JF Ptak Science Books

When Man Becomes Degenerate is Woman Then to Blame? (1907)

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I guess I've seen this question before, though not nearly as full-frontal-assault as this one. One of the odd things in this little pamphlet (Capital Punishment, When Man Becomes Degenerate is Woman then to Blame?", self published by Franklin E. Parker at the appropriately-named  Ariel Press in Westwood, Massachusetts in 1907)is that the question in its title is only relatively lightly addressed and that at the end of the short work. What Mr. Parker is mostly concerned with is capital punishment, which in the end he sees only as another form of murder, and makes a number of biblical arguments against it.  Relative to the responsibility of woman in the degeneracy of man (which doesn't seem necessarily related to the issue of capital punishment) the argument is made that she is not--conditionally. That is, if a woman stays with the degenerate man than she does share responsibility--on the other hand in 1907 I do not know what religious beacon suggesting what a woman might do about that situation. On the third hand another statement maintains that is a "soul-part of man"...(and is) "dominated more or less by his superior will and subject to his ruling", which presents a different issue altogether so far as being married to a degenerate man goes.  

I only gave about five minutes to this pamphlet, so there may be a more adaptable answer somewhere--there is actually a long poem at the end that was light and sugary and withering, and I knew that reading it would be like watching a baseball player adjusting his batting glove for a full five minutes, which means you needed it to stop as soon as it started.  Anyway, I think the ultimate answer to this woman/blame question was both "yes" and "no". 

 

 

 

The Square of Art: the Beauty of Square Roots (1833)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2640    

I'm returning to this earlier post, expanding it some, and correcting it a little--usually that comes with a fresh eye to something old and done. The work on hand is a mathematics manuscript by a man named Charles Fisher. It is an impressive  collection of work on square roots, from √2 to √628.  It is 13.5 x 8.5 inches and  160 pages long--it is all gathered together in separate quires, the text now just floating inside the original binding, which is very thick paper wrappers that have been handled so much that it feels like leather.   Most of the manuscript is still bound, though several "signatures" are now loose within the binding. It is a good, solid copy in spite of what I just wrote--and it is a definite work of art.  

The book is paginated according to the sq rt that Mr. Fisher was working on, so the first page is page 2 for √2. Also, the work figuring the square roots of 2 through 196 takes place on the top half or portion of the first 80 leaves, at that point he turns around and starts on the first leaf again, working out his answer for √197 (and √198) on the first page (or page 2) and so continues to the end of the book again, ending up at 628. The square roots seem pretty complete through the 400s and then gets very spotty after that, for whatever reason Mr. Fisher leaving some numbers alone. So far as I can determine the work is complete in itself.  

The (seeming)  author of this manuscript, Charles Fisher, evidently took a solitary pleasure in calculating the square roots of numbers from 2  to 628  not bothering to write down the 24 perfect squares to 576.  (The sqrt being r² = x for every non-negative real number x.) From the few bits that I have checked the man seems to have done a good job back there in the 1830’s.   (Note: we'll deal with square root of  3 at another time...)

I cannot determine where this book was written or who Mr. Fisher was.  There is a transcription in the last leaf of the book of a community meeting dedicating people to building a meeting house in "Wertham" (?) near "Cumberland', and that something like the minister or preacher would be shared with the local Baptist Church or something like that, and signed in January 1767.  Fact is though that there is at least one contemporary date in the work and that is 1833 for figuring the √193.  

Fisher's work is pretty elegant.  Take for example his solution (and proof) for the square root (hereafter sqrt(x)) 309,

which the calculator living under this page says is 17.578395831246947    Mr. Fisher’s answer is 17 10/17 = 799/17=89401/989=309 100/989, and after some more involved arithmetic comes t the lovely proof number of   

4121989960986322995025 /13339773336525317136 or

309.00000000000000000007496379247

Which is getting pretty close. 

The only note that Mr. Fisher makes on his calculations is for the sqrt(193), which he notes as “the hardest number to find the approximate root of any between 1 and 200. I have found it after repeated trials and have this evening wrote it in as above. March 1^st, 1833. CF.”  (This may actually be 1838--I think it is dependent on interpretation.)

The lovely cover of the work:

And a double-page sample of the work:

Brevity and Complexity--ALGOL 1960

JF Ptak Science Books     

I think that I'd like to start a new category of observation for this blog--complicated work explained with celebrated brevity and clarity.  Earlier today I wrote a post on a 24-page effort by the great polymath and mathematical titan, Henri Poincare, describing his Newtonian-clad version of relativity, and it certainly classifies as a superior effort in a short, clarifying description of a wide and complex topic.  Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is another--it is considerably longer though incredibly short for the work that it undertakes, ending with a sentence that has become an independently-standing aphorism, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence".

But for right now, I'd like to look at a splendidly short work.

Much is owed to people like Peter Naur¹, a Dane who made an enormous contribution in the development of computer languages by being the lead developer in the creation of ALGOL.  As a matter of fact Naur (b. 1928) received the computing world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize (“highest distinction in Computer science")–the Turing Award–for this work, receiving the high honor in 2005. The official short description–again in the manner of the Nobel Committee– was “(f)or fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of ALGOL 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming”.         

This all came to mind while looking through Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60 (published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, May 1960) which was edited by Naur.  ALGOL was the creation of 40+ minds, twelve of whom were listed contributing to this paper-–it is a great testament to Naur to control all of that input, producing a superb fifteen page report of great brevity, beautiful logic and utter accessibility.  Perhaps If the team was given a lot more time Naur could’ve made his work even more succinct, but I really doubt it.  It is written in a language that is somewhat foreign to me, but I can certainly appreciate the way the work is structured its precise manner of presentation.  It seems to me a hallmark of communicating complicated ideas in a small space.

NOTES:

1.  NAUR, P. (with J. W. Backus, F. L. Bauer, J. Green, C. Katz, J. Mccarthy, P. Naur, A. J. Perlis, H. Rutishauser, K. Samelson, B. Vauquois, J. H. Wegstein, A. Wijngaarden,M. Woodger) . Report on the algorithmic language ALGOL 60. Offprint:  Communications of the ACM,  May, 1960, vol 3, #5. 25x21cm, pp 299-314.  Rare.  There is evidently an two months earlier-but-not-circulated report (no citation for this), as well as a later printing appearing in  Numerische Mathematik, 2/1, December, 1960, followed in 1962 with a longer edition.

A Warehouse of Locomotives: Baldwin Works, 1884

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There's a definite real-or-imagined synesthesic olfactory reaction to this image--for me, at least.  The ceiling seems a little low for what's going on inside this building, and none of the skylights seem to be open, and the windows in the walls don't seem to be letting much air in, which means that there is probably a high order of oil and carbon and other hammering smells going on here, locomotives being assembled/fixed check-to-jowl. It looks to be about 12/15 locomotives in one stage of completion or another in this structure, which means that there must've been 100-200 engineers and workmen in there too.  The Baldwin Works--pictured here in a detail of the front page of the Scientific American for May 31, 1884--is shown at a very strong point in U.S. railroad development, and there's nothing quite like an image like this that spells out "work" than something like this. 

 

Ghost Vision and the Coming of T.V. (1850)

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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

 

Nazis and T.V. (1944)

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In all my exposure to the history of WWII  I am pretty sure that the only reference to Nazi television has been along the lines of the Berlin Olympics or Carl Sagan's Contact--that and some dim memory about Hermann Goering somehow in the great bowels of the labyrinthine Nazi bureaocracy being in control of German tv broadcasting. The International Future of Television, an address by Paul Railbourn before the American Television Society in NY in January 1944, discusses the possibility of television in the Post WWII era--and in that, stresses in no uncertain terms that the Nazis should not have access to the new medium. Railbourne (who would later become a VP at Paramount Pictures) talks about how Hitler utilized and dominated the radio, and how after the war re-education of Germany was necessary along with free enterprise undertaking of newspapers, radio, television, and motion pictures.

He notes that "The Nazis are well aware of the importance of television...destroy the Luftwaffe and the Krupps Armament works, but leave television in their hands, and we shall be leaving them with the most powerful weapon of all..."

To that end the author discusses post-war control of radio and television in German. He also talks about establishing television networks throughout the U,.S. as quickly as possibly to "capture world leadership in television programming" and "carry the gosphel of the Four Freedoms to all mankind".  "...Television will play a vital role, for good or ill as it is intelligently or evilly directed, in the establishment and maintenance of an enduring peace, once the present war comes to an end."

Railbourne made good sense, and had I think a pretty good idea of the coming possible influence of the new medium.

 

Definitely Not Your (Modern) Weekly "People Magazine"

JF Ptak Science Books  

I have developed a sort-of  collection in the History of Blank and Empty Things series of not-filled-in applications and diaries and questionnaires and such, from Hitler Jugend diaries to notebooks for Nazi Warsaw telephone directories to applications for membership in the Women's KKK, and so on.  This small installment comes on the back inside cover of Labor Conscription, What Does it Mean...Involuntary Servitude!, a hopeful ad for the reader who might be interested in Socialism and receive the magazine People Weekly, as this far Left pamphlet was after all published by the New York Labor News Company on behalf of the Socialist Labor Party U.S.A. This of course in no way bears any resemblance to the modern People Magazine, the fruits and labor of that periodical being sweets and fats.

 

An Early-ish Report on the V1, January 1945

A Technical Report on the V-1, 1945

This report by Henri Moreau (1893-1978) and Paul Chovin--"L'arme allemande de represailles V1"--is an offprint from Genie Civil, and printed 1 January 1945. It is  9x6 inches and runs a pretty-involved eight pages, and was printed in Paris (newly liberated from the German army 25 August 1944) on the first day of 1945.

I was frankly surprised to find this fairly-well documented piece on the V-1, and couldn't find much on it at all, so I reprinted the report in its entirety. Some of the text runs off the side of the scanner, but that is the best I can do in scanning the pamphlet without taking it completely apart. 

 

A Coy Zeno, Without Paradox

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, though that is probably due to my "looking around" more than anything else.  

Full text for that here at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23100/23100-h/23100-h.htm

A Staccato of Abbreviations and Finding a Mystery Where There Probably Isn't One

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2641  

I'm a fan of some sorts when I see a string of abbreviations, the writer writing for a sympathetic readership with at least a common interest in the subject, knowing that spelling everything out isn't quite necessary, especially if space is an issue.  On title pages this happens often with the academic heritage and awards of the author, as well as with quotes, which is where my staccato of abbreviations was found.

The "misunderstanding"  here occurs in the reference to the source of the quote, which has lead me to look at a number of different editions of various works by the author.  It seems that I am missing something big in finding the source of the quote, because it seems impossible that an attribution right there in the middle of the title page of one of the most significant scientific periodicals of the 19th century will surely not be incorrect.

First, the abbreviation for the origin of the quote ("Nec aranearum sane textus ideo melior quia ex se fila gignunt, nec noster
vilior quia ex alienis libamus ut apes.") starts out beautifully with "Just. Lips." followed by "Monit. Polit. lib. i. cap. 1."  

This is simply the name of the author and the work and page on which the quote is found:  initially I thought I was dealing with Justus Lipsius'¹ Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex : qui ad principatum maxime spectant. Additae notae auctiores, tum et De una religione liber..., printed at the Plantin Press in Leiden in 1589, book one (of the six books/sections comprising the work, or "libri sex"), chapter one.

I don't know the quote, and even though I have been working with the Philosophical Magazine for quite some time, I never had bothered to to it up until a few days ago, when I bumped into this question.  The thing is, the quote doesn't really appear in I/1--it does appear in the Additae Notae section at the end of the book, on page 463, referencing I/1 on page 12.

Then I figured out that this seemed to not be the correct book, although the quote was more-or-less placed correctly.  The "Monit" part of the extended abbreviations refers to Lipsius Monita et exempla politica : libri dvo, qui virtvtes et vitia principum spectant...²(1609), in which I did a text search for keywords and the quote but could not find it, which further confuses a matter that may not be confusing to someone more familiar with these works and era. 

It seems impossible that the Phil Mag would be in error here on the issue of referencing a great classic and that it must be that I'm just missing something,  and no doubt someone reading this will let me know.

In any event I thought I'd share this little ride I took on the back of this quote...which, by the way, along with the sentence preceding it, is quoted and translated  in  The Reception of Erasmus in the Early Modern Period, edited by Karl A. E. Enenkel (page 188. below):

Image source and full text at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/imgPiz59MiscellaneaOpal

 

Which in a sense is similar to the Newton/shoulders-of-giants quote, here the writers building upon that which has come before and making something different of it. 

Notes:

1.  Justus Lipsius  "...humanist and classical scholar...(Joost Lips, 1547–1606), described by his admiring correspondent Michel de Montaigne as one of the most learned men of his day (EssaysII.12), was the founding father of Neostoicism, a key component of European thought in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries..."--Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online))

2.  Lipsius' work can be seen here at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/ivstilipsimonita00lips

Hanging the Catatonic (1922)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2641

I came upon a reference to hanging an unconscious man sentenced to death in a roller-coaster presentation of a pamphlet called Legalized Murder, "Thou shalt Not Kill"¹ (or thereabouts).  It is the work of Dr. C.T. Riley (of New Matamoras, Ohio), and the "thereabouts" title is on the front cover of the pamphlet, and there is no title page per se, so the title may this or something else (like walking into someone else's conversation mid-way and needing to title it).  It is, well, a highly individualized work, very vehemently against the death penalty, citing scripture and medicine and law and just about anything that Dr. Riley could get his hands on, while on occasion slipping in an advertisement for his medical practice and Gall Stone Cure. He is very passionate, and though his arguments seem very disjointed to me, when approached on the paragraph level he can make a very convincing argument.

What was remarkable to me in this pamphlet was the cover illustration, which shows a hangman about to fix a noose around the neck of an unconscious man tied to a chair and placed on the scaffold's trap door. The livid caption identifies the execution of "Church of Chicago" but so far as I can tell the subject is not again mentioned in the pamphlet. A little research reveals that this was a Mr. Harvey Church, who murdered two men to steal a $1500 Packard, and who was sentenced to death for his crime in 1922. It turns out that Church was a "dementia praecox catatonia", and forty days before his execution, he entered a catatonic state. 

There is a remarkable report by an unnamed physician published in the  Journal of the American Judicature Society, to Promote the Efficient Administration of Justice, vol 7/2, August 1923, documenting the condition of Church "in the death chamber".  He of course was completely unresponsive, impervious in reaction to pain; the doctor reported clenched fingers and toes that were so cramped together that the doctor could not move them using all of his strength; nor could he part Church's lips, except after exertion, and them only revealing the top teeth.  Here is most of what the doctor reported:

This is the state in which Church was sent to the gallows.

This case was probably enough to force a discourse on the issue of capital punishment. I knew that there was extreme treatment like this of people with similar disorders--epileptics for example were treated far more harshly than the general population--and in general pleas were made for sterilization of people with a wide range of disorders as well as the establishment of "colonies" for the rest of that population.  Hanging the unconscious (if that is what Mr. Church was) was something I had never heard of before. 

Notes:

1.  C.T. Riley,  Legalized Murder, "Thou shalt Not Kill, printed by the Baptist Banner, Parkersburg, West Virginia, 1930 (third edition), 69pp. 

An Uncommon Reference to a More Uncommon Reference from the OSS Library (1944)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2640

Here's an uncommon book, referenced in a very obscure publication, written by a politician and operative whose time had come and gone, and from a library that did not exist to the public. Andre Marty's Pour liberer le Patrie des Armes our la France, Confiance en le peuple. ("For the Liberation of the Homeland, ARMS for France/Have Trust in its  People") is a small publication made from an address made by him on 25 July 1944, one month exactly before the liberation of Paris. It was incendiary and was not of course printed in Nazi-occupied France; rather it was printed at Editions Liberte, in the still-safe Algiers. Marty (1886-1956) was a long-time member and leading official of the French Communist Party, and at the time of this writing he had been sent to Algeria from the Soviet Union, where he had been working directly with the Comintern since 1939.  Marty returned to France soon after the liberation of Paris where he attempted a revolution or some such thing, trying to take advantage of the chaos and confusion of the newly-forming French government. 

In the back of the short pamphlet there was an advertisement among the ads for a provocatively-titled book, Le Martyrs des Antifascistes dans les Camps de Concentration de l'Afrique du Nord. It is unusual first of all because it is about a concentration camp and there was still nearly a year left of WWII; secondly, although I cannot find a copy of it online, I assume that the camp is a Vichy camp, set up to contain and work and kill Jews, anti-fascists, and other perceived enemies of Vichy France and Germany. More so than the present pamphlet, this is what would make for good reading. Also, this ad sits among a number of others that refer to the coming liberation of Algeria from France--something that would not happen until the end of a complicated and awful war of liberation fought from 1954 to 1962.  The Vietnamese operated under the same assumption, that the end of the war would bring about their freedom, too, from the French--the French would be done there in another nine years, replaced by the U.S., and then another 30 years of war.  The end of WWII brought with it high clarity and deep complexities, with thousands of varied decisions affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people.  August 1945-August 1946  was a very involved and potentially dangerous year, full of joy, relief, desperation, hope, hunger, revenge, gratitude, homelessness, and so on. 

The last bit on this unusual pamphlet--my copy comes from the Library of Congress, having been sent there from the library of the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), which was the direct predecessor of the C.I.A., the library holding things classified and not, though it was not for the use of  the general population. According to the WorldCat/OCLC, there are no copies of this in libraries in North and South America, with only three copies located institutionally in Europe. 

Using a simple search on WorldCat for the period 1930-1938 there seem to be about 33 distinct and different titles using “concentration camp” in the title or having “concentration camp” as a keyword—so, not all that many; not unknown, of course, but still, not too many. There's about an equal distribution between German/Soviet concentration camps, with Spain and Cyprus making appearances. A quick look for 1940-1944 shows 103 titles, 90+ of them being distinct and separate. Beyond 1944 the data on WorldCat gets a little tricky to use in such a quick way as I have been using it—the numbers get bigger and the classifications grow wider, so I really can't offhandedly say how many books were published in, say, 1945/6 using the previously-mentioned criteria. This at least gives some idea of the relative opacity of the topic within a restricted parameter.

Some of the interesting titles from the early period include:

The Sonnenburg Concentration Camp. New York City: Workers International Relief and the International Labor Defense, 1934. 

Chernavin "Life in Concentration Camps in USSR." The Slavonic and East European Review12.35 (1934): 387-408.

Appalling Facts. Letters from German Concentration Camps.Martin Lawrence: London, 1935

Niemöller, Martin, and A. S. Duncan-Jones. From U-Boat to Concentration Camp : The Autobiography of M. Niemöller.London, 1936.

Nazi Germany : Its Concentration Camps, Penitentiaries and Jails.New York: Labor Chest, 1938

 

Note:

Being part of the OSS library the Marty pamphlet has a borrower's card in a slip on the rear cover, and it shows that it was borrowed "indefinitely" by Henry B. Hill, 1907-1990, "...professor of history, University of Kansas, who developed British history there and later at Wisconsin".--Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 by Robin W. Winks (New York: William Morrow, 1987), pp. 495-97.  I have about 50 or so of these former OSS Library pamphlets, and they almost all have these call slips, and they almost all have been borrowed at one time or another.  And for those names I could find they all had gone on to interesting lives. 

 

The First Moscow Show Trial (1928)

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A.Kartasheff,  Michael Federoff, and Boris Kateneff's  To the Civilized World, an Appeal by the Russian National Committee is a four-page leaflet and  strongly-worded plea to the world-at-large to not recognize the Communist government in Moscow, this based on the behavior of the government and judicial system is the first of the show trials, "the incredibly cynical Donetz trial".  I've included the three pages of the indictment against the "bestial face" of the "communistic power which has its headquarters at Moscow".  The authors ask readers to "not hinder us in our fight for freedom" and to "repudiate your direct and indirect alliance with the criminal power that has established itself in Russia".  To the great tragedy of many dozens of millions of people, this was just the beginning of the Stalinist purge.

This was also H.L. Mencken's copy, given over in January 1929. I can't find him writing on the trial in 1928, but it does make an appearance in his American Mercury in November 1937 in a savage article "Ten Years of Soviet Terror" (by the magazine's "Moscow Correspondent", an anonymous writer kept so for the sake of protection):

 "The famous Shakhty trial in May, 1928, was the signal for a nation-wide persecution· of engineers and technicians, which lasted for fully three years. Hundreds were shot on the thinnest evidence and on mere suspicion of sabotage, thousands were herded into concentration camps. They became the technical personnel in the vast structure of forced labor under the command of the GPU which, at its height, employed more than 2,000,000 prisoners." Also:

 

"The first major political trial to have the effect of seriously aggravating the internal political situation in the Soviet Union was the so-called Shakhty case. The defendants were engineers and technicians in the coal industry of the Donetz basin. They were accused of “wrecking,” deliberately causing explosions in the mines, and maintaining criminal ties with the former mine owners, as well as less serious crimes, such as buying unnecessary imported equipment, violating safety procedures and labor laws, incorrectly laying out new mines, and so on. At the trial some of the defendants confessed their guilt, but many denied it or confessed to only some of the charges. The court acquitted four of the 53 defendants, gave suspended sentences to four, and prison terms of one to three years to 10. Most of the defendants were given four to 10 years. Eleven were condemned to be shot, and five of them were executed in July 1928. The other six were granted clemency by the All-Union Central Executive Committee."--
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 258 via Espresso Stalinist  https://espressostalinist.com/the-real-stalin-series/moscow-trials/

Tunneling the Thames, 1824

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2639

Here's an interesting find made while browsing a volume of The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Arts¹ (of the Royal Society of Great Britain): Samuel Ware's²  “A Design for making a Public Road under the Thames from the east side of the Tower near Iron Gate Stairs to the opposite side of the River near Horseley down”. This interesting article outlines a proposal and plan by Ware for building a convenient/strategic tunnel under the Thames. This proposal was made a year before the M. Isabord Brunel/Isambord Kingdom Brunel Thames Tunnel project, which when completed in 1843 was called “the Eighth Wonder of the World”, being the first tunnel built under a navigable river. This project was an incomplete success, as it was opened to only pedestrian traffic for decades until in 1869 it was modified to accept trains (which were smoking coal trains, not replaced with a cleaner electric variety until 1913). In any event the idea was to be able to transport goods under the Thames, which would replace the practice of across-the-Thames shipment that would necessitate stopping the very vigorous sailing traffic on the river. It is interesting to note that in the Ware plan it is the snaking approaches to the tunnel that would accept wagons and carriages are plainly visible; the Brunel plan called for such access but ran out of money before the commerce aspect of entering the tunnel was built. “

This is a cross section of the porposed tunnel, wide and tall enough for carriages and two walkways:

[Detail from the 13" folding cross section of the Thames tunnel.]

And a rather massive entrance to the proposed tunnel:

From the Ware article:

“The following particulars of the Estimate describe the mode of erecting the arch way: Compensation for the ground and buildings on the north side of the river and for the ground and buildings on the south side to form the approaches cofferdams in ten successive lengths or removes to keep out the water and strutting to keep up the ground; Steam Engines to keep the works within the cofferdams dry and subsequently for draining the road should there be occasion; Digging out a channel in the bed of the river for the arch way and the ground for the approaches; Removing the refuse earth claying filling in and leveling two feet above the extrados of the arch Yorkshire; Ledgers for the foundations of the arch way and walls of the approaches and embankments and piling as occasion may require; Stone work cut in voussoirs of the arch and counter arch; Lining with lead 10lb to the foot superficial enveloping these arches; Super arch of brick work lined externally with tiles in; Centering for the arches; Forming and gravelling the road ascending one foot perpendicular to twenty feet horizontal; Drains pipes foot paths and lamps; Embankments and other walls and parapets in the approaches; Facings to the entrances to the arch ways and tollhouses. Estimated amount of the above works 250,000 [pounds]”

“Political Advantages: The communications by this road between the officers of government and the Mint; Trinity House Custom House and the Tower may be facilitated; A readier transfer of soldiers arms and stores to and from the counties north and east of London and the Tower to and from Woolwich Chatham and Sheerness by land will be obtained by this arch way; This arch way may be made a military pass there being proposed a private way to it from the Tower...”

Notes:

1. London, printed by John Murray, 1824, volume XVII. 8.5x5”, 408pp, 3 plates, plus a long folding schematic of the engineering proposal for building a road under the Thames.

2. Samuel Ware (1781-1860) was employed by the sixth Duke of Devonshire on both his English and Irish properties. In 1814 he exhibited a view of Lismore Castle at the Royal Academy. Ware was architect to 'many excellent buildings in Ireland'...”--Dictionary of Irish Architects, 1729-1940.

Also included in the volume:  

Also:

• Poisson, Simeon Denis. “Extract of a Memoir on the Theory of Magnetism, read at the Academy of Sciences, 2 Feb 1824, pp 317-334;
• Daniell, Ferederic. “On Evaporation”, pp 46-62;
• Olbers, Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias. “Remarks on the Catalogue of the Orbits of the Comets that have been hithertoo computed”, pp85-96;
• Encke, Johann Franz. “Further Remarks on the Periodic Comets...” pp 98-100.

A Course in Chemistry Offered by Michael Faraday, 1825

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Here's an interesting bit I just found in a volume of  The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Arts ¹(of the Royal Society of Great Britain): a wonderful two-page advertisement for a course in chemistry, given by William Thomas Brande (1788-1866) and “M. Faraday” (1791-1867). Brande was the more-established and more socially-correct figure at this point (1825), though Faraday had already made a major contribution to the history of chemistry in 1821; still, the overall accomplishments and appeal of Brande probably explains the top billing. Be that as it may, lecturing under the auspices of the Royal Institution was a very big deal, and obviously a major imprimatur for any career. (Also it is interesting to note that Brande's Manual of Pharmacy I advertised for sale on a full page opposite page vi.)