JF Ptak Science Books

Socialist Utopianopolis vs. Everyday Free Marketry Vision of Post-WWII Australia

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This cover design decorates a pamphlet from the Australian Constitutional League of Sydney, written towards the end of WWII, and visualizes a post-war Australia in terms of free enterprise  vs. socialism.  Needless to say the pamphlet took a dim view of the prospects for a Socialist Australia.  From my brief read of the little pamphlet, the Utopianopolis on the "myth" side of the future belongs to what the Socialists could never deliver; on the right side, the "reality" part, as socialism "promises everything" but "fails in everything".

 

Fighting Chlorine Gas With Cotton and Gauze, August 1915

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This photo is so filled with dread and sadness, a squad of English soldiers posing with their volunteer-made cloth gas masks.  The image appeared in the August, 1915 issue of Popular Mechanics, and showed the state of gas protection for infantry as it existed in the earliest stages of gas warfare in WWI.  Popular Mechanics addressed the issue of poison gas in an earlier (monthly) issue, but it really wasn't until this present issue where there was a series of articles/photos relating to poison gas protection. The first employment of poison (chlorine) gas occurred a few months earlier on 22 April 1915 against the French by the Germans at Ypres, in Belgium, and it turned out to have a ripping and widely disastrous effect on the French lines in what would be the first and only major offensive launched by the Germans that year. .  

 

A Bad Place to Be in 1917

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"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."--Randall Jarrell, formerly of the USAAF

Jarrell explains the poem so: "A ball turret was a plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24 and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose."--(Wiki)

I used to think that the belly gunner (in a ball turret) in a B-17 (or B-25, or PB4Y-1) was about the most dangerous/wrenching position to be in an aircraft--that is, until I saw this illustration in the January 1917 issue of Popular Mechanics:

 

This was just a bad place to be, in a 14'-long bomb-like aluminum casing, hanging from a 3000' 3/8" cable suspended from a Zeppelin, trying to relay the positions of whatever you could find, and with people shooting at you. At least, though, the observer had a woolen mattress on which to lie (so says the caption).  

The Dawn of the Robots

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Well, this is not anywhere near the first image of a pulley, not anywhere close--I don't even know when that might have appeared in a manuscript in the 9th century or whatever--but it is certainly a very attractive gang of pulleys.  It occurs in Robert Fludd’s (1574-1637), Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia (1617), and in it I see Hero/Heron of Alexandria (10-70 ACE), who I always associate with the pulley, and of course with his famous inventions, which in some respect are early forms of 'robots". In this image, the pulley-robot of some complex means is operating the "drive element" and producing (still) the necessary energy to produce change. And--this is a fine image.

[Source:  University of Utah,http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/naturae/id/1587/show/1265/rec/1]

A High-Renaissance "Tank", 1623

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2623

A Possible-reality from the visionary Robert Fludd

[Source:  University of Utah, http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/naturae/id/1587/show/1265/rec/1]

 

Robert Fludd’s (1574-1637), title page for his  Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia (1617) features this complicated astrological wheel with a Vitruvian-man-like image at the vortex of the imaged pulls and pushes of the cosmos.  In addition to everything else, real and imagined, Rosicrucianism and astrology and puffy-birds, Fludd, who was  an English physician, delved deeply into the real stuff of the world in this book in addition to all of the other make-believe--optics, the musical intervals, perspective drawing, hydraulic engineering, construction of lifting machines, military engineering and many other interesting, physical science topics.  But this drawing, right there on the title page, reveals Fludd’s real interests and shows what governs what he does.  Everything else, the math and and the physics, services this need.  Of course the image is beautiful, which is why it is here, but it is also a deeply personal, exploitative, cover-all for the things that Fludd wanted to find. 

But there is a lot of other interesting, and potentially-applicable, real-world stuff and proposals in the book as we can see in the exotic and wonder-full image of the high-Renaissance "tank" that leads this short post.  I'm not so sure that this thing would actually move--I assume that it has wheels or something in the front part to help it move along, otherwise that weapon would go nowhere.  Even if it was assumed to be mobile, I wonder about whether four horses is enough to move along something that size plus six canon and at least three men.  Even with 5'/6' wheels, it seems not so likely that this would roll across a battlefield.  All that said, this did exist in the realm of possibility, and Fludd had much else.  Since I've been doing research on the first battlefield appearances of tanks, this one particular image caught my attention.  

 

Understating an Understatement: One Week Over Germany, March/April, 1945

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Here's a map the meaning of which was destined to be understood by even the most casual observer. It appeared on a propaganda leaflet distributed by the U.S. 8th Army and shows the Allied bombing campaign against Germany from 29 March to 4 April, 1945.  (Most of the action depicted here looks to be the U.S.A.A.F., though I haven't gone through each and every bombing location.  I do know that in the last two weeks of the war that the Soviets used about as much bomb tonnage on Germany as was used by the Allies over the preceding two years.) The red lines show the destination of bombing raids, of which there are many for a seven day period, and for my reckoning this is not a complete listing.

Perhaps this leaflet would have been even more provocative if it represented the number of planes on average that would participate in one of these missions, which would of course would be in general hundreds of aircraft. For example, for the raid on Hamburg on March 30 there were over 530 aircraft involved; and for the same location on the next day, another 469. Also there were another five raids on Hamburg over the week following this one depicted, including one on April 8/9 with 440 aircraft.  Also this week of raids takes place right after and before other series of massive raids, including a mission over Berlin on February 3 1945 involving 1000 B-17s and 575 Mustangs, followed 11 days later by the bombing of Dresden, which was followed three weeks later by incredible bombing of Tokyo. And later, on April 14, more than 2200 aircraft would take to the air.  As impressive and scary as this leaflet looks, it doesn't really begin to approximate the amount of damage inflicted on Germany from the air. (One last example--the large raid on Crailsheim, where I happen to have been born, destroyed about 80% of the small city.)

The title Eine Woch ueber Deutschland ("One Week Over Germany") must have been disturbing for a soldier to read--particularly with the corollary at bottom, which stated that there was no German response so far as bombing England in retaliation was concerned.  By this point, the German soldier knew the situation was FUBAR, though I do not know if there is a good German translation for that.  

"Two Disastrous Failures" for the German Army, January 1945

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This leaflet was dropped on German forces by the R.A.F. and the U.S.A.A.F. soon after the breakout of the Battle of the Bulge/Ardennes in the end of January 1945, which is one of the two failures that this propaganda sheet screamed about. It is a little odd though that in the map it would show the German offensive at its worst for the U.S. troops, with the bulge extending far west and Bastogne being surrounded. Yet the leaflet told of the German losses of its failed offensive ("Operation Watch on the Rhine") though it did not show the progress of the month-long battle on the map, which should have shown the battle line back to its more-or-less original position by 25 January.  In describing the catastrophe of the German position in the east (leading with the loss of "380,000 soldiers") the date of 24 January is mentioned, which supports the late January estimate for a printing date. This was of course the Vistula-Oder Offensive. which saw the Soviet Army advance more than 300 miles in a month, right to the Oder, only 40-odd miles from Berlin.  In that campaign the German Army Group A was just about killed--of the 450,000 soldiers in retreat along this long and disastrous front during the month of January, the overwhelming majority were casualties, including nearly 300,000 killed. The wounded and other survivors became POWs.  The bottom line of course was that the winter of 1945 for the German soldier was bitter and deadly, and was leading nowhere except defeat--there was no doubt what lay ahead after seeing that map of the Eastern Front. 

"The Reich is Split Up/Further Resistance is Senseless" 1945

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I'd hate to have been in some Wehrmacht hellhole foxhole in March 1945 and have this fall on me from the sky--I imagine there was little doubt that even the lowest ranking soldier knew that they were in the grip of some enormous vise.  

Odd View of Manhattan, as Seen Under a Flirting Flying Cop, 1898

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I've been looking at early flying machines--real and imagined--and came upon this at the Library of Congress. There is very little information provided there, and I can't find anything useful online, so I'm going with this being a poster for J.M. Gaites' "musical farce comedy" The Air Ship, which was copyrighted in 1898.  The cover shows a "Fly Cop" making a rather forward advance on a young woman with babies in a basket fashioned as a part of the stern of a delicate self-propelled flying machine. The cop is attached to a min-dirigible that has a small fan for its propulsion, as does the remorseful-looking butcher bringing up the rear to the scene. And the whole thing takes place high over Manhattan, looking to be well north of midtown, and probably 3k feet high.  Looking south over the island we see the rivers (and a hint of the Brooklyn Bridge) and then in the harbor a suggestion of the Statue of Liberty.  

 

Source: Pinterest account for the Library of Congress  / Flying Machines

Tremendous Montage of Early Airships

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I stumbled upont his fantastic illustration depicting nearly four dozen early balloons, many of which are a mystery to me. The image comes from the Library of Congress site, though the origin, title, and even the date of the engraving are unknown. It is known as "Balloons, airships, and other flying machines designed with some form of propulsion" though the title was bestowed by the library--one thing for sure is that it was engraved by "E. Morieu, and was printed between 1880-1905.   

Source: Library of Congress [https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchCode=STNO&searchArg=2002722676&searchType=1&recCount=10]

Somebody at the LC identified some of the airships, as follows: 

•  "Single sheet with 45 numbered illustrations; lacking identification key.-  no. 18 shows a collapsible Montgolfier balloon from 1784; no. 23 is the design for a glider balloon as described in "Reflections on the aerostatic sphere," 1783 (September); no. 24 depicts Jean-Charles (l'avocat) Thilorier's plan for transporting troops across the English Channel to invade England, ca. 1800; and no. 32 shows the dirigible balloon glider used by Charles Guillé for an attempted ascension in Paris, November 13, 1814."
• Also, I know for sure that the last figure, #45, at bottom right, is a steam-powered balloon railway...

There's another fine image of fantastical airships below, also from the LC, and published in Puck, volume 59, no. 1509 (1906 January 31)--this shows the airships of the near future putting the Panama Canal out of business:

Source: Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.26030/?loclr=pin

 

A Paper Internet, 1917 (and 1932, and 1945)

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Before the internet the idea to the idea of the internet existed to some extent in the head of a great unsung hero of the U.S. WWII figure, Vannevar Bush, a person who may well have invented the notion of hypertext.  Vannevar (pronounced “van ee var”) was a flinty no-nonsense New Englander who was an organizational and mechanical genius who as a professor at MIT developed a remarkable analog computer that greatly advance computation capacities for solving differential equations.  This was in the 1930’s, and even after creating an improved electromechanical version of the machine still chose the wrong way to go in the soon-to-materialize digital computer revolution. During WWII Bush was one of the most important Americans in the war effort, overseeing the entire scientific effort of the U.S.—an enormous effort dispatched beautifully (and successfully).  His importance in this regard is difficult to overstate. He also published a short paper on the hypertext idea in an article in The Atlantic in 1945.

 The article, “As We May Think”, outlined his idea for a device he called the MEMEX (“memory” and  “index”), which compressed and organized all that its user could remember and whatever information would be obtained in the future via electromechanical apparatuses, and available with associative tracking between the microtext frames.  So all manner of book and papers and reports and newspapers and images would be microphotographed and stored in a beautifully-indexed mechanical retrieval system where it would live with the information of others.  There was also the possibility of real-time textual additions to whatever it was that was retrieved, the genetic precursor of hypertext.  Bush’s thinking has been deeply recognized (and also by the creators of the internet) as the intellectual grandparent of the modern internet. 

This brings me to the image leading this note--the index card train. It appears in the pages of Popular Mechanics for January 1917, and was certainly a step forward in organizing finger-tip data--it just wasn't quite a database, or Google, though the idea was present, after a fashion. 

And then I had a mostly-comical response to the image that I found in the pages of the March 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics--it was actually on the back of the page that I was looking for (on passenger rocket travel across the Atlantic).  With Bush in mind, this image of a man reading a miniaturized book using the system of Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske (1854-1942), and the photo shows the reader with the equivalent of a 100,000-word novel.  The article only mentions this one book, and doesn't venture out into imagining anyone carrying a library with them, nor does it mention searches of organizing systems, but it does bring to bear the possible power of having access to a vast amount of info held on a strip of paper about the size of a newspaper column.  And for 1932, that was a strong idea.

 

A Fine, Hand-Held Adding Machine, 1869

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I found this wonderful ad in the July, 1869 issue of American Agriculturalist--in real life the woodcut is about 1.5"x 4" and was designed well enough to attract the attention of a practicing farmer needing arithmetical help. It was an intelligent design and speaks well of the readership. The adder--patented just a year earlier by Charles Henry Webb (1834-1905)--would have a long life in various incarnations, a history of which can be found in this excellent article at History-Computer.com (http://history-computer.com/CalculatingTools/Gadgets/Webb.html)

Very Early Spotter's Guide for Enemy Aircraft, London, February 1915

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It seems to me that this is the first time that a spotter's guide to enemy aircraft appeared in The Illustrated London News for WWI--ditto the Illustrirte Zeitung.  I luckily own both journals covering the war years, and I've been through every page of coverage, and I do believe that this is probably a very early display of German aircraft identification for popular use.  Of course it couldn't really get that much earlier, as the war was on for 150 days or so. And the "air forces" in general were very new--the German army received their first aircraft in 1910 for what would eventually become the  (for France it was 1911), so the concept of a unified fighting force of the air was still very new.  In another 1111 days or so, the aircraft losses for the Entente and the Central Powers would be about 110,000, or about 5,500 of these pages showing destroyed aircraft.  

Not-Pouillet's Law, But Pouillet on Population (1842)

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The other day I retrieved the year 1842 from the mass of the great Comptes Rendus down in the studio, and among the unexpected papers was a truly unexpected one, and it belonged to the physicist Claude-Servais-Mathias-Marie-Roland Pouillet. Pouillet--mostly know as Claude or Mathias--is best remembered today for Pouillet's Law and his association with Ohm's Law, though unfortunately this paper was five years past the first appearance of his law (and 15 years past Ohm's).  What was unexpected here was that this was a long contribution by the physicist Pouillet on the laws of population--now Pouillet had a long and varied career, and published a number of papers in a wide array of physics topics, so the population dynamics paper seemed fairly well outside his scope.  It is also--for the Comptes Rendus--quite long at 16 pages.  

This is outside of my own area, and although I can't see any reference to the work of Malthus (1798) or related, I'm afraid the whole thing leaves me behind.  And so I include a link to the full paper found at the Biodiversity Library (http://biodiversitylibrary.org/item/20656#page/875/mode/1up)

Spheres of Recognition: the Portable Gym and Expulsion from Eden

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There was some immediate shock of recognition¹ in seeing this image, not for its exact earlier-appearing twin, but in the sense of the spherical delivery of something. In this case, it is a Victorian woman and the depiction of her movements in exercise--but what I remember and associate with this is the Sienese Giovanni di Paolo, and his depiction of the monumentalist giveth-and-taketh cycle of the creation of Eden and the epic fall of humanity and its expulsion from it.  Di Paolo put a lot of history into that one image, the perfection of Paradise and the disposal of Adam and Eve, all via the intercession of the creator of the universe, with is hands of the sphere of being. (Talk about building a wall....).  

The image of the exercising woman is found in a delightful book used in the banner of  Chloe Roberts (@chloerabbits ) a web producer for the Wellcome Library (http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/) collection and which is available in full in a very nice copy at Internet Archive, here: The portable gymnasium : a manual of exercises, arranged for self instruction in the use of the portable gymnasium, by Gustav Ernst, London 1861: https://archive.org/details/b20399789  Image source for the di Paolo:  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_di_Paolo#/media/File:Creation-and-the-expulsion-from-the-paradise-11291.jpg

Notes

1. And with that phrase comes other immediate recognitions, mainly in book form: William Gaddis' The Recognitions, and Edmund Wilson The Shock of Recognition; both are excellent, and the Gaddis may well be a contender for Great American Novel.