JF Ptak Science Books

Beautiful Oil Rigging Supplies, 1899

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I couldn't resist this display found in a short work on the gold fields in Queensland, Australia. William Adams & Company furnished the necessaries for running oil rigs and various mining instruments. The gear is just nicely displayed and presented:

Source: The Goldfields of Queensland. Charters Towers Goldfield, by William Lees. Queensland, Outridge Printing Company, 1899. 24.5x18cm, (xii), 34pp. Numerous small inset throughout, including larger images of works, as well as birds-eye views of Charters Towers, Queensland, and four other full-page photo images, plus a full-page plan of the works. (The title page calls for “With Plan” and I'm pretty sure that the full-page plan is it; I can find no evidence of a folding plan or any such thing in the table of contents. The publication is also filled with many advertisements. 

 

Unbuilt New York City, 1935--Almost-Closing the NYC Harbor

 

JF Ptak Science Books 

I recently uncovered an interesting, unpublished and probably not-acceptable engineering report to extend the ports capacity in the Hudson River at New York City--the ports of the  area being famously over-busy for a long period of time, especially right before World War II.  Charles Palliser and Frederick W. Capon presented a proposal in 1935 for a unification of the port and airport facilities to take care of the overcrowding and overworked problem.

 

What they came up with was Liberty Landing, a mile-long and half-mile-wide facility that nearly bumped into the Statue of Liberty (and hence its name).  The plan called for backfilling the “flats” that were just south of Jersey City, as “the natural formation of these were very favorable”, which meant that the airport-port combo would extend all the way into the harbor to the edge of the channel, which would put it further out than the Statue of Liberty, which would also be just hundreds of feet away from the end of the north runway.

Also attached to the backfill and new land would be a one-mile-long floating dock.  Oh my!

The floating island would also have vehicular tunnels that connected it to Staten Island and the Battery.  There were facilities for seaplanes, airplanes, railroads, dirrigbles, and trucks, plus a military installation, a custom’s house and the US Mail Service, so that all commerce would converge at this one point, which sounds interesting (for about 20 seconds). 

This is a good candidate for the “Better Left Undone” award for 1935.

As I look at the photograph of the aerial view of the plan it strikes me that if the designers increased the surface area by only 125% or so they could’ve connected the new facility with Governor’s Island AND Brooklyn, building a land bridge from Jersey City to Coney Island—a superbly bad idea to cap an already strongly bad idea. 

The report is called, simply, Liberty Landing, and published by the architect in Jackson Heights, NYC, 16 Septmeber 1935.  This is also the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy (accepted 10 October 1935), which is where the history of this project ends.

I recently uncovered an interesting, unpublished and probably not-acceptable engineering report to extend the ports capacity in the Hudson River at New York City--the ports of the  area being famously over-busy for a long period of time, especially right before World War II.  Charles Palliser and Frederick W. Capon presented a proposal in 1935 for a unification of the port and airport facilities to take care of the overcrowding and overworked problem.

 

What they came up with was Liberty Landing, a mile-long and half-mile-wide facility that nearly bumped into the Statue of Liberty (and hence its name).  The plan called for backfilling the “flats” that were just south of Jersey City, as “the natural formation of these were very favorable”, which meant that the airport-port combo would extend all the way into the harbor to the edge of the channel, which would put it further out than the Statue of Liberty, which would also be just hundreds of feet away from the end of the north runway.

Also attached to the backfill and new land would be a one-mile-long floating dock.  Oh my!

The floating island would also have vehicular tunnels that connected it to Staten Island and the Battery.  There were facilities for seaplanes, airplanes, railroads, dirrigbles, and trucks, plus a military installation, a custom’s house and the US Mail Service, so that all commerce would converge at this one point, which sounds interesting (for about 20 seconds). 

This is a good candidate for the “Better Left Undone” award for 1935.

As I look at the photograph of the aerial view of the plan it strikes me that if the designers increased the surface area by only 125% or so they could’ve connected the new facility with Governor’s Island AND Brooklyn, building a land bridge from Jersey City to Coney Island—a superbly bad idea to cap an already strongly bad idea. 

The report is called, simply, Liberty Landing, and published by the architect in Jackson Heights, NYC, 16 Septmeber 1935.  This is also the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy (accepted 10 October 1935), which is where the history of this project ends.

I recently uncovered an interesting, unpublished and probably not-acceptable engineering report to extend the ports capacity in the Hudson River at New York City--the ports of the  area being famously over-busy for a long period of time, especially right before World War II.  Charles Palliser and Frederick W. Capon presented a proposal in 1935 for a unification of the port and airport facilities to take care of the overcrowding and overworked problem.

 

What they came up with was Liberty Landing, a mile-long and half-mile-wide facility that nearly bumped into the Statue of Liberty (and hence its name).  The plan called for backfilling the “flats” that were just south of Jersey City, as “the natural formation of these were very favorable”, which meant that the airport-port combo would extend all the way into the harbor to the edge of the channel, which would put it further out than the Statue of Liberty, which would also be just hundreds of feet away from the end of the north runway.

Also attached to the backfill and new land would be a one-mile-long floating dock.  Oh my!

The floating island would also have vehicular tunnels that connected it to Staten Island and the Battery.  There were facilities for seaplanes, airplanes, railroads, dirrigbles, and trucks, plus a military installation, a custom’s house and the US Mail Service, so that all commerce would converge at this one point, which sounds interesting (for about 20 seconds). 

This is a good candidate for the “Better Left Undone” award for 1935.

As I look at the photograph of the aerial view of the plan it strikes me that if the designers increased the surface area by only 125% or so they could’ve connected the new facility with Governor’s Island AND Brooklyn, building a land bridge from Jersey City to Coney Island—a superbly bad idea to cap an already strongly bad idea. 

The report is called, simply, Liberty Landing, and published by the architect in Jackson Heights, NYC, 16 Septmeber 1935.  This is also the U.S. Copyright Deposit copy (accepted 10 October 1935), which is where the history of this project ends.

A Map of Television to Come, with a Price Tag (1946)

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On the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing (today being August 9) I found this old friend down in the studio:  People's Television, Survey and Popular Guide to What You Want to Know..." (possibly) by Walter J. Greene, which was published about a year after the bomb was dropped, received by the Library of Congress in December 1946. In a full twenty-four pages the author laid out the future of the young ("virile youth returned from war") television and how signals could be transferred across the country for transcontinental broadcast, setting up the reader for the appreciation of the coming boom in the new medium. It includes a small section on how television programs are made (I've included a scan of a small diagram of the Du Mont-John Wannamaker Television Studios located at the Wannamaker store in NYC), a chapter on how the public will determine the content of television programming ("The Public is the Final Judge, Television can "Grow Up" More Quickly than Radio"), a bit on the future of television reception, color television ("A Cause for Some Speculation"), all followed by a reader quiz and a list of televisions and their prices.

Of course the major draw for me in this pamphlet is its cover--one of many efforts using imagery of nuclear explosions to sell an idea or a product. The image is a famous one, being the second airburst test shot at Bikini, Marshall Islands, on July 1, 1946. The image has been cropped a bit, the full versions showing a beach and palm trees in the foreground.  Although it seems as though this was a mass-produced item, it just doesn't seem to show up anywhere, nothing substantive in the intertubewebs, and the trusty WorldCat/OCLC finding hardly anything--surprising. 

And a map of the coming transmission scheme:

And a list of televisions available--remember that $1 in 1946 is about the equivalent of $12 today, so, $1000 for an upper end model would have been about $12k today, which is considerable:

And of course the television studio of 1946:

 

Blade Runner Retinal ID, 1936

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Retinal identification is here, and it is in the future; it was in the past's version of the future in the P.K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968 which was turned into the film Blade Runner in 1982. But long before any of this was Carleton Simon and Isidore Goldstein, who figured out that everyone has a unique display of veins in their retina. Of course this is not exactly as obvious as fingerprints, but evidently it was a whole new thing in 1936--highly interesting. ANd what struck me was the "retinal protractor" which was like a grid placed on the photograph of the retina onto which the veins would be plotted, from there it went to another step to assign numerical values. 

Source:  Carleton Simon. The retinal method of identification; a new system of classifying retinal patterns. Presented at the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police at Kansas City,Mo.,September 21st to 24th, 1936.  11x8.5" cover/title, followed by 4 leaves of photographs showing the sections of the retina, examples of the veinous patterns, and a retina protractor explaining the sections of the retina in a common language for placement.  

 

Dr. Simon--"Criminologist of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, New York Association of Chiefs of Police..." is the Simon of Simon & (Dr. Isidore) Goldstein, whose groundbreaking paper¹ introducing the uniqueness of the patterns of retinal blood vessels and their use in identification, was published on September 15, just a week before this address.  This publication may have been a handout for the address--it consists of one page of cover text and a separate four leaves of retinal pattern photographs with a cover sheet.  

 

Notes:

1. "One of the most accurate techniques for human identification is based on the uniqueness of the retina blood vessels pattern. The unique structure of the blood vessels in the retina pattern was first introduced in 1936 by Simon and Goldestein" . Simon C,,  Goldstein, I., "Retinal Method of Identification", New York State J Med. 1936 Sep; 15-- noted in "Retinal Identification System using Fourier-Mellin Transform and Fuzzy Clustering" Hadi Jafariani and Hamid Tabatabaee, Indian Journal of Science and Technology, Vol 7(9), 1289–1296, September 2014.