JF Ptak Science Books

The Great Totalisator, 1926

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post in The History of Lines series

And so I came to this fabulous word in a running title in the pages of the November 13, 1926 issue of the Illustrated London News--what a fabulous thing, in- or out-of-context!

Totalisator.

It appears as a noun in the Oxford English Dictionary as "totalizator", and goes back to a first use in 1879 in reference to the Pari(s)-Mutuel system of betting--but here, in this article, the "totalisator" is an electric betting mechanism.

It could also be the nickname of a certain Golem-like U.S. politician implausibly running for the presidency who can make no mistake and is a fanatic for himself no matter the consequence or the validity, or it could be the name of a 1960's Japanese cartoon monster (either heroic or evil), or it could be an adversary of the 1966 Batman, or it could be a 1930's Robot (pronounced "Robit"), or I guess a suite of a lot of other things.  It was certainly a behemoth when installed at Ascot in 1925/6, occupying 5 structures and run by a team of 1,000--a fantastic thing of the future, here today, and gone soon afterwards.  

"Totalisator" seems much more definitive and authoritative with a period at the end of the word, as above, in arial black. 

Maps: "Through the Meander of the Rockish Creek", 1842

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2634

Back when I had an open shop I would occasionally have surveyor customers who would come in after hauling themselves back to our civilization, telling stories of doing some re-survey of some piece of land in the out-yonder and finding old heart of pine stakes from a 19th c survey still in place and just very slightly off from where the modern surveying tools would place them. These guys held these earlier surveyors in high regard, as they did hard work and did it very well, using relatively rudimentary tools (optics, chains, measures) in sometimes very difficult conditions and doing a splendid job of it.  

These stories came to mind just this afternoon again while cataloging an 1842 manuscript map made by Britton Hood, Jr., who was the son of a surveyor Hood Sr. who worked through the late 18th c and into the middle 19th. The family was in Wayne County, and it looks as though the son stayed their, at least according to a hint or two on this map. Although the location is not identified the major feature is, and the "Cabin Branch" of the map may be the "Cabin Branch" creek that is south-central Wayne County, south of Goldsboro. 

The very attractive part of this map of course are the landmarks used by the surveyor, and as is very often in these cases, the "landmarks" tend to be simple trees and stumps and such.  Of course is you identify a starting place and base all of the landmarks upon that, then virtually anything can be used, so long as it is referenced to something. 

This leads to the found-poetry of the Hood map:

Some of the then-essential and now-delightful boundary markers for Hood's 770-acre survey include:

• Maple at the fork of the branch
• stake at the turn of the branch
• pine at the west edge of the swamp
• large cypress at the edge of the swamp
• through the meander of the Rockish (?) Creek
• Lightwood stump
• small pine
• pine
• large dead pine
• stake
• pine at the prong of the NW branch
• and of course a pine, pine, and small pine, among other things.

The map in full (the original measuring 6x7"):

 

Hardware Store Hieroglyphs 1869

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Maybe you don't see it, but the first thing I thought of when I saw this small (and here enlarged) ad in The Engineer for 1869 was its remarkable-ish similarity to hieroglyphs. The point is fairly strong, and a person can get a very good idea of how things were being built in 1869--especially if you were an alien and had deciphered what the purpose of all these things was. Granted it isn't as simple or complex as the SETI plaque on the Pioneer 10 and 11, but it does have the flavor of a message to the future, or to another life form in another place.  

Underground Military Airbases, 1938

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The Cement and Concrete Association of Great Britain had issued several pamphlets in 1938 regarding air raid shelters for the protection of individual families, groups, and  cities.  In the pages of the Illustrated London News, writer and war correspondent John Langdo-Davies (1897-1971) reviews (or at least shares) the associations plans for underground fortified military airfields, the illustration for which I reproduce below:

Langdon-Davies saw utility in these ideas, no doubt tempered by his experience covering the Spanish Civil War, which saw the first modern wide-scale use of bombing from aircraft, including the work done by the German Luftwaffe the impact of which was not lost on too many people. In any event, the aviation facilities were not moved underground for a variety of general reasons, some of which have to do with the utility of  the vast scale of the operation versus the introduction of replacement aircraft.  This doesn't address some of the most adventurous ideas shown in the drawings, like the (assumed to be) very large hangar "deep underground", the planes hauled up and shot into the air on a catapult, which is a different matter entirely.  The overall interest here though is the recognition--growing in 1938--that there is something going on in Germany that requires this sort of response.  

"Indian Title Extinguished"

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That's part of a short (12pp) and stiff little report from President James Monroe asking if Indians of all sorts did indeed have title to their lands within the United States, which means, I guess, that this was really a question in 1822.  Given the number of treaties and the number of treaties with the Indian Nations abrogated and annulled, it still didn't set me up for this basic question, which really surprised me.  The publication comes a few years after the end of the first Seminole War (1816 or so to 1819), the aim of which was to move the Seminoles from north Florida (Florida having just been ceded to the U.S. a few years earlier) to, well, somewhere else--this occurred in 1819, when the Indians succumbed and were forced to live in central-ish Florida. This didn't last for long, though, as the Second Seminole War (a much more expanded conflict fought 1835-1842) decimated the Seminole population, the remaining people subsequently were removed from central Florida completely away to Indian Territory.  This was all before the official "removal policies" begun under Monroe and John C. Calhoun (and many others), something that people like Ben Franklin and George Washington were against back in their late days.  

The answer seems to be that the question was too big for an answer. and that each treaty had to be treated individually--in short to me it reads like a null response.  

Nabokov in Black & White

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The odd thing about seeing Vladimir Nabokov in black & white is that he had such an enormous relationship with color, though perhaps the man had the capacity to add color where it wasn't and then interpret the missing colors as they should or could before passing them on through his synesthesia machine. In any event, I just wanted to post this picture and share--this is an original of some sort (large, at 11x14") and though I must say I don't know all that much about him this image seems to be an uncommon one...or at least I don't recall seeing it before:

I can't make out what page the 2nd Webster's is open to, but it really doesn't matter.  It is interesting to see his collection of Lolita in the background: 

 

In any event, here's a bit from Speak, Memory, in which Nabokov describes aspects of his synesthesia with color and sound (the quote found originally on the Fury Factory blog, here: https://furyfactory.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/nabokov/):

“…I present a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the color sensations seem to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror ofo take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and hucklberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and dipthongs do not have special colors unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh, a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation).

WWII Military Secrets in British Politics (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2632

Earlier this morning I was looking at a collection here of British political leaflets (half around the 1893-1895 period, and then a bunch around the election of 1945) when I read a very dynamically-designed handout on how the Conservative government mobilized private industry into wartime production, and concentrating on the much-beloved and critical creation of the "Mulberry", or the Mulberry Floating Harbor.  It was striking to me as the creation of the enormous floating harbor was a deep secret as it was an essential element in supporting/supplying the Allied invasion force in Normandy--and yet here it was, used by the Conservative party in an effort to re-elect Prime Minister Churchill, in a publication printed perhaps just a year after they were pulled across the Channel and presented to the world.  

And it happens again in the following leaflet, though this one employs more of the previously secret stuff.

I should say that this election in July 1945, just weeks after VE Day, produced what must have been a very surprising/shocking result, a result probably none the less surprising ti the unexpected victor, Clement Attlee, whose Labor Party produced a seemingly impossible small landslide victory over the (probably) most important man to the Allied war cause in WWII, Winston Churchill,  and the Conservatives.  (Churchill would return the favor in 1951.) 

Be that as it may, in this leaflet, "Free Enterprise Helped Us To Win", produced by the Conservatives and ending with the ringing slogan, "Vote National", used a number of the important and secret military developments of WWII as examples of private enterprise contributing to the war effort and standards of free enterprise.  Included here are:

• the private designers who helped produce the singular Spitfire and other warplanes;
• F.I.D.O, the Fog Investigation Dispersal Operation, which was a system installed at airfields by which (as teh acronym tells us) dissipated fog and smog so that bombers and fighter planes could land in foggy conditions;
• P.L.U.T.O.: "Pipe Under the Ocean", an enormous operation, was an oil pipeline that stretched from England under the Channel and basically deep into Europe, a much more efficient and effective way of getting fuel to your advancing armies than, say, the German shipping fuel across the Mediterranean where Rommel's necessary petrol was happily torpedoed;
• and as mentioned the Mulberry Harbours, plus the "sticky bomb", the "flying dustbins, the Spigot mortar, and the P.I.A.T...all brought about by Free Enterprise, according to the leaflet.

I'm not saying anything about this in a judgmental way--I was just very surprised to see all of this here, in a public handout leaflet, a brief description of some formerly very secret stuff. 

Warm Sulphur, Coal, and the Cosmos, 1836

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post    An installment in the History of Dots series. 

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was among the earliest of the photographic pioneers, or pre-pioneers, as he asserted priority of his photographic method for 1835 when Daguerre revealed his own (very different) method in 1839. Talbot (or Fox Talbot)  was also a practitioner of the art, publishing a stone-cold and revolutionary work of photographically illustrated books, The Pencil of Nature. The work I am interested in for the moment though is this interesting observation he made in the Philosophical Magazine (third series, vol 8) for 1836, when he unexpectedly turns somewhat poetic in the start of his paper:

 

I don't know about the history of likening some collections of objects to a starry night of deep space--certainly it has been going on for a long time, with people finding similarities (and perhaps corollaries!) between collections of stuff (dust, moles, sand, so on) and the night sky. (There are several such observations on this blog, the most recent one, on deterioration of paper in a book and the negative of a deep space image, appears here:  http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2016/08/page-in-a-book-or-stellar-field.html )  Funny thing here is that there is some small connection between my paper-damage-night-sky and the Talbot's sulphur--some part of this 'foxing", those reddish discolored "dots" on the page of the book, is a product of the interaction of the paper and sulphur oxides, like sulphur dioxide, produced in the burning of coal. So: coal and the cosmos. 

Here's the image from that earlier not-Talbot  piece on the blog--one is a close-up of paper deterioration in a book from 1820, and the other is an ultraviolet photograph of the Pleiades made in 2009:

 Unfortunately Mr. Talbot only provided a thinking-image of his experiment...

What Electricity Tastes Like (1824)

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So, while reading in the Annals of Philosophy--an interesting and curious journal with some important original contributions and a large selection of other interesting papers previously printed elsewhere and which was later absorbed by the more-prestigious Philosophical Magazine--for 1824, after finishing trying to figure out what Gay-Lussac was doing with lightning conductors, I stumbled my way through the journal's monthly section of "scientific notices".  The "notices" are usually very brief and give enough info so that the reader can make their way to the original source to read the report in-full.  This is how I came upon the great J.J. Berzelius and this note on the taste of positive and negative electricity, which I admit I've never thought of before--I was curious about what the "distinction" would be, and then was surprised by what he wrote:

By the way, it was determined in 1822 by some governing committee in France that all large churches in France needed to be protected by lightning conductors--the use of lightning conductors was established during Ben Franklin's time. This evidently became an issue following a particularly bad bit of weather during which numerous churches were damaged, including the Rouen cathedral. Gay-Lussac notes elsewhere that the fear of thunder makes no sense, because the lightning event has already occurred, and that nothing can happen at this point. He points out that people struck by lightning never hear it coming, and have no idea what happened to them--small is that comfort.

 

Intergalactic Rocketport, in Glorious Big Color! (1938)

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This was a big gulp of a very colorful possible futureworld in which intergalactic travel has become possible, this image of this model being given an advanced peek prior to the New York World's Fair of 1939.  "Intergalactic" is a big deal, because, well, there are galaxy-sized distances involved--even in Star Trek the Next Generation, the Enterprise never in the run of that series leaves the galaxy under its own power, and so the possibility of travel between the galaxies such that there could be a 'rocketport" for it would be a very big deal, indeed. Perhaps that is what was needed at the New York World's Fair of 1939, given the state of things--the long Depression, the Munich Appeasement and the hollow "peace in our time", the Austrian Anschluss, the seizure of the Sudetenland, Kristallnacht, the Spanish Civil War, and the continuation of the Japanese assault on China, all could have spelled out the need for some sort of relief even if that was fictional and in the future. Certainly intergalactic travel would qualify for that, as did a number of other pieces of speculative/scifi entertainment that year: Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were alive and well, Superman appears for the first time, and Orson Welles scares the wits out of a certain trumpian segment of the population  with the Halloween-night performance of The War of the Worlds. Perhaps the time was ripe for the rocketport--especially in such vivid color.

[Source: Popular Mechanics, volume 70, August, 1938]

The Heights of the Himalaya Mountains, 1819

JF Ptak Science Books   

Offered below is a highly interesting and diverse volume of  The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Arts, edited at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, published by John Murray for the Royal Institution, London, 1819; volume VI; illustrated with three engraved plates and a folding map; contained in the volume of iv, 402.  Bound in half-calf with calf tips, and marbled boards. Nice copy. $350

• "Height of the Himalaya Mountains (pp 51-75), signed “H.T.C.” with a 12x9” folding map.

This is a wonderful story on the early mapping of the Himalayas, including the work of Capt. WIlliam Webb, who identified the highest mountain peak in the world in 1817.  The map that accompanies the article is mostly blank, with teh exceptions of rivers, a few establishments, and a series of peaks enumerated with Roman numerals. In this case, the peak XIV is identified, rising to 25,643 feet. It is today known as Nanda Devi, located approximately at 79.30 E. Long and 30.30 N Lat.  The peak today is the second highest in India and 23rd highest in the world.

“A list of many lofty peaks of the Himalaya mountains, measured by him, has appeared in divers publications. It agrees, so far as it goes, with the ampler information contained in a Memoir of his survey officially furnished by him. The Memoir, which bears date 30th Nov. 1817, supplies further measurements of more than two hundred elevated positions, geometrically taken for inaccessible heights -. either barometrically or geometrically, for accessible stations - and in
both methods, for twenty of those stations. It explains the mode in which the whole survey has been conducted, and these measurements executed...”

“ From 1816-1820, William Web spent five lonely years surveying Kumaun (he determined the height of Peak XIV or Nanda Devi as 25,669 feet, just 24 feet higher than today's measurement)..”.--https://www.himalayanclub.org/hj/65/3/the-great-game-of-mapping-the-himalaya/

And this: “so far as our knowledge extends, the highest mountain in the world.” Its local name was Nanda Devi and for the next 30 years, while expeditions into the central Himalayas from Tibet and Nepal remained impossible, Nanda Devi reigned supreme as the world’s highest mountain (its height is now established at 25,645 feet/7817 m)--http://imagingeverest.rgs.org/concepts/imaging_everest/-288.html

Other noteworthy articles include

• "On M. Stromeyer's new Metal, Cadmium. In a Letter from J. G. Children, Esq. to the Editor. . ." (On the essential element, Cadmium.)
• "An Hypothesis to account for the variable Depth of the Ocean." A terrific piece of thinking on measuring the semi-immeasurable in 1818. 
• "Pitcairn's Island. From the Voyages and Travels of Amaso Delano. Boston, 1817."
• "An Account of some Experiments made on the Body of a Criminal immediately after Execution, with Physiological and Practional Observations." by Andrew Ure, M. D.  Again, another endlessly interesting article....

 

North Pole Airport of the Future (1945)

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This gives a new and heavier, colder (?) meaning to the phrase "on the rocks"--a envisionaryiztion or some such thing of air travel in the future, the image fueled or at least paid by Seagram's Canadian Whisky. At the time when this ad appeared (in LIFE magazine, ca. 1945/6?) it was evidently okay to articulate distilling interests with air flight, which isn't done so much anymore--that and of course smoking in-flight, though admittedly people were firing up their cancer sticks with a lot more legroom than one has nowadays, but, still, I'd have to go with cramming my body into a too-small seat than sit in a smoke-filled tube with little tiny flames in a combustible environment.

So this particular piece of the future foresees long-distance flights but not necessarily long distance planes, with the flights accommodated by a large airport at the North Pole that would serves as a nexus for international connections. The airport there "would be heated" and the runways kept clear of snow and ice via 'radio waves', adn that's about it.  No matter about the details or the ideas, so long as you start your own flight of fancy with Seagram's.  

One of Earliest Looking-Down-Between-the-Legs Views of the Eiffel Tower, from an Aeroplane, 1909

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"An Aviator's-Eye View: a City Seen from an Aeroplane" is a wonderful composite image published in the Illustrated London News on October 30, 1909.  It represents the city from the point of view of the observer--in this case, the Comte de Lambert, who was the first person in France to receive flight instruction from Wilbur Wright, and who made what the New York Times referred to as "the most remarkable cross-country flight ever accomplished in an aeroplane¹". This was reported in the Times on October 19, 1909, when de Lambert  "left the Juvisy Aerodrome at 4:36 o'clock in a Wright machine, flew across Paris to the Eiffel Tower, circled it, and returned to his starting point, arriving safely at 5:25", during which he reached a height of about 1300 feet. The you-are-there perspective is a very uncommon one in my experience, and now doubt this one must have given the readers of the ILN a queasy feeling of what flying looked like.  

Notes:

1. New York Times, October 19, 1909: "PARIS, Oct. 18. -- The most remarkable cross-country flight ever accomplished in an aeroplane was made this afternoon by Count de Lambert. He left the Juvisy Aerodrome at 4:36 o'clock in a Wright machine, flew across Paris to the Eiffel Tower, circled it, and returned to his starting point, arriving safely at 5:25..."
2. 

Ghost Vision and the Coming of T.V.

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Joseph Plateau, "On a New and Curious Application of the Permanence of Impressions on the Retina", in Philosophical Magazine, volume 36, January-June 1850, pp 434-436; followed immediately in a much longer paper, "Second Paper on a New and Curious Application of the Permanence of Impressions on the Retina", pp 436-452, with two plates.

From: An Annotated Bibliography of Flicker Fusion Phenomena...1740-1952, by Carney Landis, p. 

Plateaun (1801-1883) was the inventor of the Phenakistoscope in 1829, and contributed often (especially with considerable papers in 1835 and 1836) on the issue of persistence of vision. Here he writes of that and the flicker effect, which is the optical illusion in which individual sequential units of images are viewed as a continuous motion of images, which is a trick of the visual system and makes such this as the movies and cartoons and animated shows possible.  It is a terrible irony that this great writer on physiological optics would be blind or nearly so by the 1840's, this a result of an experiment conducted requiring him to stare at the sun for nearly half a minute.

"Plateau studied in great detail the phenomena of accidental colors and irradiation, both of which he considered as arising from a similar cause related to the persistence of the image on the retina. Accidental colors are those that appear after staring for some time at a colored object and then at a black surface, or closing one’s eyes and pressing one’s hands over them. An image of the object appears, usually in complementary color and slightly diminished in size. Plateau’s results include his discovery that accidental colors combine both with each other and with real colors according to the usual laws of color mixture. In irradiation luminous objects on a dark background appear enlarged, a factor clearly of interest to astronomers, among whom the question of the extent of the enlargement was causing controversy. Plateau showed that enlargement occurs regardless of the distance from the object and—explaining the varied experiences of the controversialists—that the mean amount of enlargement from the same source varied considerably from one individual to another."--Dictionary of Scientific Biography

Also in this volume: J. Locke, "On the Phatascope", pp 453-457, "instrument for giving single vision with two eyes" (--Living pictures; their history, photoproduction and practical working. With a digest of British patents and annotated bibliography, Henry Hopwood, 1899.)

Among the many other articles in this volume is William Fishburn Donkin's "On the Geometrical Interpretation of Quaternions", pp 489-502. (See Alexander MacFarlane's Bibliography of Quaternions..., 1904, full text here: http://ow.ly/kFRy304gfVD

Notes:

• See The History of Discovery of Cinematography timeline, which is especially interesting for the pre-1850 entries http://precinemahistory.net/1850.htm

 

Hollow Plans for the Sleeper--Protection from Bombs and Poison Gas (1927)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2642

The OED identifies the first usage of "anti-aircraft" 1914, which to me sounds about right--and pre-war, of course.  That said there were many opportunities to talk about something like anti-aircraft, as bombs had been dropped from balloons by 1849, and airplanes had been dropping grenades/bombs on soldiers and civilians since at least 1911--so the need for combating aircraft was there even though it took the English language a few years to catch up to expressing this idea in a hyphenated term.  By (July 23) 1927, when this short picture-article appeared in the Illustrated London News, there was enormous evidence and experience in anti-aircraft weaponry, and it seems that the Soviet Union was in a full-bore status to acquire a competent system, or at least they were talking about some aspects of it.  

And thank goodness for the artist who provided us with the right stuff to discern the "bomb falling", dropped from one of the "attacking Bomber Squadron" able to elude the anti-aircraft defenses. The changes proposed were somewhat large in regards to the AA emplacements--on the other hand, the reassignment of space in a city, spreading stuff out so that dropped and exploded bombs would destroy less given the proximity of structures to one another, is an absolutely monumental undertaking. The city rebuilding is also predicated on a problem, as the bomb used in the scenario is only 1000-kilograms. This sort of thinking extends into the nuclear age when think tanks proposed Atomurbias, spreading out the population of the U.S. to basically everywhere, as well as evenly distributing industrial centers throughout the country (sometimes underground). There are problems enough relieving Flint of its water supply problems--it would be terrifying to think of redistributing the majority of the population of the U.S. and providing entirely new urban-ish areas for everyone to move into.  Of course there wouldn't be enough material to do this, or workers, or more, or will, but that didn't stop people from undertaking some federally-funded planning for it.  

The other part of this scenario is the protection from poison gas. And I guess we can just stop right there, with that small tank "neutralizer" that is supposed to absorb poison fumes and release "purified air", because that sort of protection just will not happen...especially back in 1927.