JF Ptak Science Books

British Jackies and Bruegel in Russia (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

"Complexity" is an interesting word with far-ranging roots and applications, and even though the may be a long trail of definitions for it, a person can generally recognize it when they see it. That word can certainly be used to describe the situation in Russia at the end of WWI, and in a way the least of it may have been when the Allies intervened there (with a large physical presence in an action was known as the North Russia Intervention/Northern Russian Expedition/Archangel Campaign) in support of the White Army/Guard in their struggle and fight against the Communist Red Army during the period when Alexander Kerensky's Russian Provincial Government fought the Germans on the Eastern Front during the Russian Civil War (1917-1923). The Allies stayed from 1918 until 1920, mostly fighting in defensive roles for White Army pullbacks.

And somewhere in that mix of complexities came moments captured by this image below--it comes from the closing weeks of WWI and shows a group of "British Jackies" readying a portion of the River Dwina at Archangel (Archangelsk) as a skating rink. Evidently there was scraping and sweeping and the use of hot water from the British ship to help smooth the ice.  

The contrast in the many figures against the wide river reminded me of the very-populated scenes created by Peter Bruegel (1525-1569) the Elder, the Brabant-born master of the social scene of the Northern Renaissance.  Bruegel painted the lives of common folks at work, children playing, and in general portrayed people at all manner of activities and celebrations, including dozens or hundreds in his social-scapes. That is what immediately came to mind seeing this photograph:

One of the many long-perspective, highly-populated scenes by Bruegel--it might take a little squinting, but this is what that photograph reminded me of:

 

[Source: The History of Ideas Blog WWI Photo Collection, details:  http://longstreet.typepad.com/world_war_i_photography/]

 

[298 images by Bruegel are available at Pieter Bruegel the Elder.org:  http://www.pieter-bruegel-the-elder.org/the-complete-works.html]

 

 

 

 

 

[Source: The History of Ideas Blog WWI Photo Collection, details:  http://longstreet.typepad.com/world_war_i_photography/]

 

[Source: The History of Ideas Blog WWI Photo Collection, details:  http://longstreet.typepad.com/world_war_i_photography/]

 

The Aurora Borealis in the 19th Century

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

 

These wonderful images of the aurora borealis  occurs as plate 4 and a text illustration on page 113 in  Amedee Guillemin (1826-1893) and edited by Silvanus P. Thompson (1851-1916), the lovely Electricity and Magnetism, published in London, 1891. The aurora is about the most impressive displays in the Earth's atmosphere, and little understood, really, until the 20th century--and it wasn't until the 19th century that it was shown that there was a relationship between the Earth's magnetic field and the aurora.  And remember, it wasn't until the early 19th c that even the clouds were given scientific designations (by Luke Howard)--the aurora borealis was a more difficult matter. 

[Sources for the images as well as the full text of the book: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupid?key=ha001481470]

 

On the Affordability of the Pleasures of Science

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I don't know how many of you have carried the collected works of physicists or mathematicians--it seems to be a special moment, having someone's output for their working lives right there in your hands. Some formats of some collected works are just too big and cumbersome (the many small volumes for an early edition of Galileo or the massive 20+ volumes for Huygens), but the Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) volumes seem to be perfect, and finely representative somehow of a fine man and excellent mathematician.  So I was saddened to see this about him and his not being able to afford his F.R.S. in a stumbled-upon section of August de Morgan's  (1806-1871) A Budget of Paradoxes (David Eugene Smith's second edition of Sophia de Morgan's edited first of 1872):

"This distinction, this mark set by science upon successful investigation, is of necessity a class-distinction. Rowan Hamilton, one of the greatest names of our day in mathematical science, never could attach F.R.S. to his name—he could not afford it. There is a condition precedent—Four Red Sovereigns. It is four pounds a year, or—to those who have contributed to the Transactions—forty pounds down. This is as it should be: the Society must be supported. But it is not as it should be that a kind of title of honor should be forged, that a body should take upon itself to confer distinctions for science, when it is in the background—and kept there when the distinction is trumpeted—that the wearer is a man who can spare four pounds a year. I am well aware that in England a person who is not gifted either by nature or art, with this amount of money power, [30]is, with the mass, a very second-rate sort of Newton, whatever he may be in the field of investigation. Even men of science, so called, have this feeling. I know that the scientific advisers of the Admiralty, who, years ago, received 100 pounds a year each for his trouble, were sneered at by a wealthy pretender as "fellows to whom a hundred a year is an object." Dr. Thomas Young was one of them. To a bookish man—I mean a man who can manage to collect books—there is no tax. To myself, for example, 40 pounds worth of books deducted from my shelves, and the life-use of the Society's splendid library instead, would have been a capital exchange. But there may be, and are, men who want books, and cannot pay the Society's price. The Council would be very liberal in allowing books to be consulted. I have no doubt that if a known investigator were to call and ask to look at certain books, the Assistant-Secretary would forthwith seat him with the books before him, absence of F.R.S. not in any wise withstanding. But this is not like having the right to consult any book on any day, and to take it away, if farther wanted." --Page 30 (with the italics in the original), from the full text via Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23100/23100-h/23100-h.htm

[Hamilton portrait source: http://www.hamilton2005.ie/]

A Coy Zeno, sans Paradox

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

 

This fine engraving of Zeno of Elea (490-430 BCE) was printed in 1739  and appeared in Veterum Illustrium Philosophorum, Poetarum, Rhetorim et Oratorum Imagines...by Jo. Petri Bellorii, and published in Rome.  It is a fairly large image for a portrait like this, measuring 8.5x5"inches on a sheet 13x9", engraved on a very heavy and thick paper.  

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"Zeno of Elea, 5th c. B.C.E. thinker, is known exclusively for propounding a number of ingenious paradoxes. The most famous of these purport to show that motion is impossible by bringing to light apparent or latent contradictions in ordinary assumptions regarding its occurrence. Zeno also argued against the commonsense assumption that there are many things by showing in various ways how it, too, leads to contradiction..." More here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zeno-elea/

It is a little curious to me that in Augustus de Morgan's wonderful A Budget of Paradoxes that there isn't a single hit for Zeno in the 150 mentions of "paradox" in the work. Full text for that here at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23100/23100-h/23100-h.htm

If you'd like to own the original, check out "Zeno" in the blog's bookstore:http://longstreet.typepad.com/books/2014/05/catalog-1-2014-physics-math.html

 

Summertime Victory: Soldiers Bathing in the Marne, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Here's an interesting and terribly human image of WWI, made deep inside the war, nearly at the war's end, and which was distributed beginning 17 September 1918 by the Western Newspaper Union, and a French Official war photograph.  It is a celebration of sorts--a short one--following the Second Battle of the Marne, which was the last German offensive on the Western Front, and which ended on August 6, five weeks before this photo was released and 100 or so days before the end of the war. The battle spelled the end for Germany in the war (costing a total of more than 270,000 killed or wounded) and began the steady march to Versailles.  After three weeks of terrible fighting, the relief to the soldiers in the photo must have been extraordinary--it is certainly palpable in the image.

[Source: The History of Ideas Blog WWI Photo Collection, details:  http://longstreet.typepad.com/world_war_i_photography/]

Giant Planes of the Hopeful Future, 1928

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

This mammoth German aircraft appeared in the pages of the Illustrated London News on 31 March 1928,a sneak-peak into the future. It may have been a shock to British aviation sensibilities--it was supposed to dwarf the largest such plane that the Brits had (the Calcutta) : 158' to 93' wingspan; 44 tons to 9 fully loaded wright; engine power, 6000hp to 1500hp, with  twelve very impressive 500 hp fore-and-aft engines.  

The plane made an appearance in real-life in the air in July 1929 as the Dornier Do X,  the largest and heaviest flying boat in history, with pretty much the stats that appeared on it a year earlier. (Stuff happens) and the Dornier is broken up for scrap by 1937.  

• Specs (via Wiki):  "Crew, 10-14; capacity, 66-100 passengers; length, 40 m[13] (131 ft 4 in); wingspan, 48 m[13] (157 ft 5 in); height, 10.25 m (33 ft 7 in); wing area, 450 m2 (4,844 ft2); empty weight,  28,250 kg[13] (62,280 lb); max takeoff weight, 56,000 kg (123,460 lb); powerplant, 12 × Curtiss Conqueror water-cooled V12, 455 kW (610 hp) each; maximum speed, 211 km/h (131 mph; cruise speed, 175 km/h (109 mph); range, 1,700 km (1,056 mi); service ceiling, 3200 m (10498 ft); wing loading, 94 kg/m2 (19.3 lb/sq ft) (at 46 tons weight)."

 

Early Approach to Anti-Aircraft, 1917

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

[Source: Illustrirte Zeitung, March 17, 1917.]

This is an odd image--or at least at first glance it looks odd--showing Turkish soldiers at "Salonikifront'/Salonica, Thessalonia practicing at anti-aircraft fire and enemy plane control.  The thing is that in order to have an sort of effectiveness in bombing or strafing the aircraft would have to be relatively low and slow, even for those times. It is possible that they could be shooting at aircraft traveling at 80mph and low enough to be reachable by rifle fire.  With this many rifles, the idea may have been workable.  

The History of Obviousness: Book Titles Needing No Books

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post               An Exciting Entry in the History of Nothing series

Sometimes publications have absolutely no pretense, stating exactly what it is that sleeps between their covers. And sometimes these titles seem more like declarative broadsides or posters and not books at all, the "book part", or any writing furthering the cover's statement,  being unnecessary, their contents being obvious. The first example here (and one which begs the response "Yup!"), Saturn Has Rings, written in 1944 by Donald Lee Cyr (of El Centro), should've stopped at the end of the title of chapter one, "A Rose has Petals", and probably could have ended on the title page.  But no, it didn't, and stretched itself over another fifty thin pages. 

Frederick Blaine Humphrey's Know Your Groceries (1931) takes an unexpected twist, spiraling into something called "biochesspathy", "natural dianetics", and somehow "applying the natural science of the Bible...to the philosophy of youth and health". 

The Book of Envelope Facts...yes.  This is actually a lovely book, in its very special way, with 55 pages of non-stop facts and semi-useless information on envelopes, and fits into a category of Deep and Repetitive Obviousness.  Chapter Two's "Arousing Interest with Envelopes" competes wildly with Chapter Three "Attracting Attention with Envelopes" and Chapter Four's "Creating Desire with Envelopes".  It is completed with eight pages of a glossary of envelope terms.

 

This last example, Alice Mills' Notes on Reading Aloud, really doesn't belong, because it is mainly on acting; but the title is so lovely I just couldn't resist. 

There are many hundreds of pamphlets similar to these that are sleeping their sound oblivious sleep here in the studio--in a way they'd make a beautiful if somewhat perplexing exhibition, though at the end of it all one might think that absolutely nothing at all had happened.  The greatest thing about such an exhibition is that most of the stuff that would be included in it are so minor/odd/trivial/proto-uninteresting that few people would ever think of searching for them without already knowing that they existed--that might make an exhibition of value in and of itself.  

When a Little Bit of the Future Got To WWI

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2600

The hope for technological advancement to hasten the end of the war were much discussed during WWI--the dreams and aspirations sometimes winding up in a serialized fashion in magazines such as l'Heure, seen below.  The promise of the magazine "The Hour" was to reveal the nature of a machine discovered that would bring an end to the war.  It was highly fanciful, this machine, and highly effective, as we can see by the large field littered with German soldiers, done in by a death ray/spray of some sort. The whole of it looks more like a Wells' Martian creation than anything else. 

[Image source: Imperial War Museum, http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/19414]

And long as I am here and the reference is at hand, I  would like to point out this terrific link to the very interesting La Guerre Infernale by Pierre Giffard, and with illustrations by the iconic A. Robida:

[Source, with a set of all of the illustrations is found here:  http://www.merveilleuxscientifique.fr/auteurs/robida-alfred-la-guerre-infernale/]

But what I really wanted to talk about was on the much smaller and real level, particularly this exploration of battlefield lighting, found in the August 1916 issue of Popular Mechanics Magazine.  It was one of the technological advances in this war that brought something that worked better and much more simple than that displayed in the magazine--the "simple" flare gun, also known in England as the Very pistol. It was new to war (along with such things as the tank, military applications of barbed wire, depth charges, flamethrowers, and such) and it was of course very effective. And deadly. And protective. It illuminated a field of battle, particularly Dead Man's Land, that stretch of land between the two offensive lines that was a meeting place of death, cluttered with bodies, spoiled earth, water-filled craters, barbed wire, waste, and so on--and it was sometimes into this sort of field that an attack would be made under cover of darkness, and it was the Very pistol that would be fired to illuminate the attackers, who would suffer greatly from it.  In any event, it was a far better response to a need than the aerial torpedo torch.  

 

 

 

A History of Obviousness, Part 2: Pointless Pointing

JF Ptak Science Books   Part of the Uninentional Absurd/Found-Surreal Department

These images become curious only when you begin looking for the curious aspect in them--then, some sort of optical/neuro magic happens, and all one can see in the image is that unexpected curiousness.  The following five examples come from a lovely work by Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales, which was published in the not-so-good-year-for-the-British-Empire, 1785. Grose was recording old structures and ruins, or semi-ruins--in general he gave each one of his views a lot of sky, which to my eye gave many of the scenes a very detached, remote quality--cold, even.  The "obvious" part of their nature comes in the filler/perspectival inclusion of human figures in the foregrounds of the subject.  For the most part, the figures came in pairs, and accounted for perhaps one percent of the image surface area, or less. They were--or were intended to be--inconsequential; however, given their placement and posture, they become very visible, and entertaining.  In this selection below, what most of them were doing was sharing, pointing at things with walking sticks, things that really didn't need to be pointed-out, especially with a big stick. But there they are, standing there in their quiet but great obviousness, pointing at stuff.  

Obvious pointing from the corner:

 

 

Obvious pointing to a cow:

 

Floating Transoceanic Airport Network, 1930's

JF Ptak Science Books  

[My apologies for the formatting issues on this--Typepad wouldn't allow me to get rid of the italics and bold]

This short shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927  first published his plan for a series of ocean-moored 1200’x200’ floating platforms standing 100' above the waves for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights.  These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of Samuel Pierpont Langley¹-- would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean.  Or perhaps there would be just five of these floating emplacements--the data changes. It doesn’t look like a very practical (or good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929. 

 

 

[My apologies for the formatting issues on this--Typepad wouldn't allow me to get rid of the italics and bold]

This short shelf-lived idea was that of Edward R. Armstrong (1880-1955), who in 1927  first published his plan for a series of ocean-moored 1200’x200’ floating platforms standing 100' above the waves for refueling and whatnot for transcontinental flights.  These five-acre stations—named the “Langley” in honor of Samuel Pierpont Langley¹-- would be placed every 375 miles across the ocean.  Or perhaps there would be just five of these floating emplacements--the data changes. It doesn’t look like a very practical (or good) idea, but Armstrong received a $750,000 piece of development change from du Pont and GM, which was major dollars in 1929. 

 

 

History of Ideas Blog Twitter Hits for February, 2016

JF Ptak Science Books  

This is the month in review for this blog's twitter feed, featuring tweets for pieces that I have written for this blog and that have brought in at least a few thousand engagements. (Most of the tweets from here--on average there are 150 so a month--do not reach a thousand. Sometimes the attraction and reach makes sense; sometimes not.  I have no idea what it is that attracts people to a story. That said, here are some of the most popular tweets:

 

 A Ghost Print of a Buried Manhattan:  http://ow.ly/YWt63  

 

 

What the Sound of the End of War Looked Like, 11/11/1918   http://ow.ly/YUxj3  

 

 

 

The history of the future of massiveness. http://ow.ly/YBJHq  

 

 

A Bicycle-Wheel-Framed Gyroscopic Experimental Aircraft, 1911

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Capt. Paul-Nicholas Lucas-Girardville of the Military Aviation Park, Vincennes, an interesting inventor and early aviator  (and author of a  Étude sur la navigation aérienne in 1899)  came up with this idea for a "gyroscopic" aeroplane, or flying machine. Initially I thought that there was no gyroscopic action and that the idea was being used for static stability, as a different body for the aircraft. But as it turns out there was some sort of gyroscope being employed here, though I do not understand how it functioned--I have to say though that it seems like an interesting experiment, especially given how early this came in the history of airplanes.  In any event, I bumped into this evocative photo in the pages of the June 22, 1911 issue of Scientific American Supplement and thought to share them.  

[Source for the two images, above and below: Scientific American Supplement, July 22, 1911   For the full text of the article in a raw-ish OCR format, see: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/abstracts-from-current-periodicals-1911-07-22/]

Out-of-Context Imagery Department: Floating & Upside Down Trees at Mother Ludlam's Hole

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post    Series on the Unintentionally Absurd

This unusual image, published in Francis Grose's The Antiquities of England and Wales in 1785, depicts a cave--and a witch's cave at that--but taken slightly out of context and with it looks for all the world that there is a tree with roots floating in the air with an upside-down tree floating to its left.  They're not floating, of course--they're just trees with roots growing across sandstone with the cave beneath.  Without the story of the cave the floating trees make more interesting thinking--with the story, and the title, the story rules.

"Mother Ludlam's Hole" is the cave of a  friendly "White Witch". It is set into a sandstone cliff in the Wey Valley, Moor Park, near "Farnham" (Frensham), in Surrey. A brief introduction to the story is that Mother Ludlam would grant loans of things to people so long as they returned them in two days. To one person she loaned her cauldron; unfortunately the person never returned it and hid it in a church. That church is said to be St. Mary's, and there is a cauldron there to this day that has evidently been there for centuries, a product of the action of the witch's borrower, or fairies. It is said that the cauldron was used to brew ale.  In any event, there is a cauldron in the 13th century St. Mary's. 

I think I like the Floating Trees possibilities a little more.  

According to English Fairy and Other Folk Tales (1890) by Edwin Sidney Hartland,‘IN the vestry of Frensham Church, in Surrey, on the north side of the chancel, is an extraordinary great kettle or caldron, which the inhabitants say, by tradition, was brought hither by the fairies, time out of mind, from Borough-hill about a mile hence. To this place, if any one went to borrow a yoke of oxen, money, etc., he might have it for a year or longer, so be kept his word to return it. There is a cave where some have fancied to hear music. In this Borough-hill is a great stone lying along of the length of about six feet. They went to this stone and knocked at it, and declared what they would borrow, and when they would repay, and a voice would answer when they should come, and that they should find what they desired to borrow at that stone. This caldron, with the trivet, was borrowed here after the manner aforesaid, and not returned according to promise; and though the caldron was afterwards carried to the stone, it could not be received, and ever since that time no borrowing there.’ [Quote source:  Mysterious Britain, http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/surrey/folklore/church-of-saint-mary-the-virgin-frensham.html]

The Cabinet of Curiosity at Eddystone

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2599

Henry Wenstanley was an artisan and an engineer with a long interest in architecture who rose to sufficiently high rank to be considered and selected to build a lighthouse at Eddystone (14 miles from Plymouth, built on the Eddystone reef, south of Rame Head). He started in 1696 and was done by 1698, and had successfully constructed the world's greatest lighthouse. He modified and reinforced it substantially in the next few years, winding up with a stout-looking if cabinet-of-curiosity appearance.  

[Image source: Derek Birdsall, Carlo Cipolla, The Technologies of Man, Pinehurst Press (UK), 1979, page 150.]

The lighthouse was extraordinary, though it did not last for long, and neither did Wenstanley.

In November 1703 Wenstanley was in the structure when it suffered a complete loss in a storm, the building swept away, along with everyone in it.  

A depiction of the impossible wave--an image no doubt that launched a thousand nightmares--fighting the lighthouse is seen here:

[Source: Dark Roasted Blend blog; original source unknown http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2006/10/amazing-lighthouse-of-henry-winstanley.html]

It is another instance of an inventor/engineer being killed by his/her creation--there's probably an easy effort to be made in constructing an alphabet of this unfortunate and unhappy crew. This was the first of five Eddystone lighthouses, all difficult building sbuilt ina very difficult location. The first two were built by Winstanley--the first he built in 1696 was damaged so substantially in a winter storm that it was rebuilt almost entirely, bringing to us the second lighthouse in 1698. As we have seen, that one last until the unfortunate 1703 storm, and was replaced by the third lighthouse built by John Rudyerd, constructed from 1708-9 and opened in that second year.  The third lighthouse was constructed by John Smeaton from 1756-9 and lasted for 127 years until it was replaced by James Douglass' structure in 1882.  Actually, the Smeaton structure (pictured below) was dismantled and rebuilt further inland on the Plymouth Hoe, where it can be found today.  

[Image source: Geological Society (UK) via https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/GeositesEddystone]

The following cross section seems to be the third of the lighthouses:

[Source: Abraham Rees Encyclopedia, printed in London in 1819]

Notes:

Here's a charming re-enactment of the failure of the structure by the Parish of Littlebury Millennium Society/History (Junior) Group:  http://www.recordinguttlesfordhistory.org.uk/littlebury/eddystone.html