JF Ptak Science Books

Cross Section of the Cockpit of a Hawker Hurricane, 1940

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I would say that there are perhaps 100 good, solid (mostly technical) cross sections on this blog, and to that number I'd like to add another. This one--barely a cross-section as things go but it does serve our purpose--comes via the cross-section-dependable Popular Mechanics for April 1942, and shows the cockpit controls for a British Hurricane as well as a smaller image for a German Messerschmidt. (Click and click again to greatly enlarge this image for the small print.)

A Flying Aircraft Carrier, 1942

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Here's an interesting idea: the flying, floating, helium-filled rigid-airship to serve as a flying aircraft carrier, and it appeared in the May 1942 issue of Popular Mechanics Magazine.  That places the idea in print six months after Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. was gearing up for its own direct involvement in WWII.  At the time of the attack at Pearl, the U.S. had 7 carriers; from this point out (from May 1942) to the end of the war there would be 16 more aircraft carriers constructed, plus another 33 escort carriers and light aircraft carriers, and of course those were all seaborne--and in addition to everything else that was being manufactured, that was a huge achievement.

One thing the article points out that is an unimpeachable positive for the rigid airship carrier--they were not threatened by submarines. 

And the cross section giving a clearer idea of what is going on in the airship: 

And another, far more awkward variation, from 1924--this has little to do with the idea above though it is somewhat related:

A Peek at the Future in Which Jobs Are Not Threatened by Machines (1940)

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This is the front and back cover of a little work directed at upper-aged kids in 1940 about how they might be employed and what life might be like in the future.  The Opportunity for Youth in Building the World of Tomorrow, published by General Motors in 1940, is a lot more sanguine and less interesting than its cover, sorry to say--but the cover is enough to reprint here, all on its own.  

There is one odd thing, one missed peep into the future, and it is made by a great figure in the history of 20th century science, Karl T. Compton, who at the time was president of MIT. He responded to a question about the impact of mechanization in a short section labeled "Man vs. Machine". Dr. Compton got a lot right in his life and saw a lot of things that other people didn't or couldn't, but in 1940, he couldn't see very far into the future of the machine.  Of course there's a particular irony with this vision and what would happen with humans v. robots at GM.  So it goes. 

 

The Greatest Traffic Machine Ever Built (to 1936)

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This is a bird's-eye view of part of NYC illustrating a pamphlet on the construction of the Triborough Bridge¹, and published in the month of its opening in 1936. The view shows its 14 miles of approaches plus the bridges themselves, all stretching out to the southeast. The perspective here shows the Queens approach at the bottom right, the East River spreading out before us, with Flushing Bay at right; the middle island is Riker's, and the two smaller island with the bridge and connections in the foreground are Randall's and Ward's, and the land receding into the distance is part of the Bronx and then on to Long Island. Overall, it is a pretty interesting map. 

 

.The Virginia Commonwealth University Social Library site quotes two paragraphs from Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker which provides a good insight into the breadth and depth of the bridge project: 

"Here was a project to kindle the imagination. In size, its proportions were heroic. For all Moses’ previous construction feats, it dwarfed any other single enterprise he had undertaken. Its approach ramps would be so huge that houses – not only single-family homes but also sizable apartment buildings – would have to be demolished by the hundreds to give them footing. Its approaches, the masses of concrete in which its cables would be embedded, would be as big as any pyramid built by an Egyptian Pharaoh, its roadways wider than the widest roadways built by the Caesars of Rome. To construct those anchorages and to pave those roadways (just the roadways of the bridge proper itself, not the approach roads) would require enough concrete to pave a four-lane highway from New York to Philadelphia, enough to reopen Depression-shuttered cement factories from Maine to the Mississippi. To make the girders on which that concrete would be laid, Depression-banked furnaces would have to be fired up at no fewer than fifty separate Pennsylvania steel mills. To provide enough lumber for the forms into which that concrete would be poured, an entire forest would have to crash on the Pacific Coast on the opposite side of the American continent.  Triborough was not really a bridge at all, but four bridges which, together with 13,500 feet of broad viaducts, would link together three boroughs and two islands."

"Triborough was not a bridge so much as a traffic machine, the largest ever built. The amount of human energy that would be expended in its construction gives some idea of its immensity: more than five thousand men would be working at the site, and these men would be putting into place the materials furnished by the labor of many times five thousand men; before the Triborough Bridge was completed, its construction would have generated more than 31,000,000 man-hours of work in 134 cities in twenty states. And the size of the bridge is also shown by the amount of money involved. With $5,400,000 already contributed by the city and $44,200,000 promised by the PWA (Public Works Administration), the amount promised for its construction was almost equal to the combined cost of all the projects Robert Moses had built on Long Island during the previous ten years."  Quote source:  http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/triborough-bridge-dedication-1936/

Notes:

1. "The Triborough Bridge, known officially as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge since 2008...is a complex of three separate bridges in New York City. The bridges connect the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx via Randalls and Wards Islands... The bridge complex ... connects with the FDR Drive and the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan, the Bruckner Expressway and the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, and the Grand Central Parkway and Astoria Boulevard in Queens..."--Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triborough_Bridge

 

A First Taxonomic Description of Coffee (1713)

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The beneficial effects of "coffee" had been  known in Ethiopia, and Arabia, and Persia, and Syria, and Turkey, long before it was used and enjoyed in the West. where coffee didn't make a strong appearance until the 17th century.  Evidently, though it took nearly another hundred years for the first taxonomic description to appear. That was the work of  Antoine de Jussieu (1686-1750) , and his effort appeared tucked away in a short article "Histoire du Cafe"in the scientific journal Memoires de l'Academie des Sciences in 1713. 

The Jussieu is a coffee incunable in the Western world. It was described as "The first recorded taxonomic description of coffee...described a coffee plant from the botanical garden of Amsterdam as “Jasminum arabicanum, lauri folio, cujus femen apudnos coffee decir” in 1713 (“Arab jasmine, with laurel type leaves, the beans of which we can call coffee”)--(Wintgens, 2009, quoted by Caas Brazil, Coffee Taxonomy.) And although there isn't an exact reference to the place of publication from what I can determine this must be the source--the article also uses a quote from the paper that is directly from this paper, which I reproduce above.  The Jussieu paper was also described as  "The first botanical description of a coffee tree, under the nam Jasminum arabicanum...made in 1713 by A. de Jussieu, who studied a single plant originating from the botanic garden of Amsterdam." found in Charrier, A.; Berthaud, J.  "Botanical Classification of Coffee", (1985), found in Clifford, M. H.; Wilson, K. C. Coffee: Botany, Biochemistry and Production of Beans and Beverage, AVI Publishing, p. 14. A wiki article on Jussieu references this paper but in a 1739 Paris edition of the 1713.  The 11-page article is also illustrated by an engraving of the coffee tree:

Notes:

A Not-Very-Ornamental Notice for the First Lecture Given by the First Female Professor at the Sorbonne--Mme. Curie, 1906

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 2705 (slightly expanded)

The poetry and moment of the auspicious occasion of Marie Curie's first lecture¹ at the Sorbonne passed without notice in the page of the Revue Scientifique, which published the lecture a week later. Curie was the lead paper in the 15 November issue of the journal, though there was nothing to mark its historic nature--only a footnote at the bottom of the page referring to the Sorbonne lecture a week earlier. 

This was the first lecture Curie delivered as the first woman to have a teaching position (the first lecturer and first professor) at the Sorbonne  She took the chair in May 1906, just a month after her husband Pierre was accidentally and tragically killed in a freak accident, being crushed by a street carriage. All of this came only a year after the Curies received their Nobel Prize (delayed due to their illnesses from the award year of 1903 to 1905, Curie being the first woman to receive the award).  The teaching chair Curie occupied was that of her late husband, who had only recently (and finally) been appointed to it. With such a history, Curie in her new position began the lecture with the final words that her husband used teaching in that same room.

I've read that the impact may have been loosened somewhat given Curie's methodical, removed, and monotonic delivery, which left many in the large crowd (attendance thrown open for the occasion) feeling underwhelmed. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography carries a contemporary description of the event so: "Mme. Curie compelled recognition from her first lecture (5 November 1906), despite her timidity, the emotion she was concealing, her weak voice, and her monotone delivery. She made no introductory remarks, took no notice of the sightseers mingling with the students, and began her lecture with the last sentence that Pierre had spoken in that very place. In every demonstration experiment she watched the result with as much interest as if she did not already know it..."²

And Dirac and many others wound up being not-engaged lecturers. So be it. But starting her lecture with the last words her dead husband spoke from the same spot is very powerful stuff, but evidently not powerful enough to move many people. 

Notes:

1. Curie, Marie. "Les Theories Modernes Relatives a l'electricite et a la matiere", in Revue Scientifique (Revue Rose), 5th series, volume VI, #29, 17 November 1906, pp 606-612, and in the next issue, #21, 24 November 1906, pp 650-654. Offered in the full volume for the second half of 1906. Bound in a very stout red buckram with reinforced hinges. The volume contains 26 weekly issues, each title page having the former owner's round rubber stamp

2.  Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol 3, p 501. 

Also see Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, 1901-1992, by James K. Laylin, pg 92./

Here's a contemporary and congratulatory review of the event: 

"MME. PIERRE CURIE THE FIRST WOMAN PROFESSOR IN THE SORBONNE. The academic year of the University of France may be said to have opened to day November 5 with the lecture by Madame Curie on electricity. The occasion was entirely unique in the history of the Sorbonne and was one of great interest. Never before has a woman had such an appointment at the Sorbonne and no other woman or man living has such a claim as Madame Curie to be heard on her special subject. The rector of the university and other prominent officials were present. The minister of public instruction M Briand who appointed Madame Curie to this professorship made vacant a few months ago by the accidental death of her husband had promised to be present but his presence was required at the opening of the parliament at the same hour. Madame Curie's course of lectures is one of the so called open courses to which admission may be gained without fees or formal matriculation long before the lecture began the outer gates were closed against those seeking admission. Several hundred of those who filled the corridors were unable to get into the hall of physics in which the lecture was to be given. I almost despaired of getting in and was one of the last who succeeded I was well rewarded for my patience in waiting. Standing behind the last and highest tier of seats in the hall I looked down on three or four hundred people of both sexes and of all ages above twenty. Back of the long table at the opposite end of the room stood the modest self possessed woman who has made the civilized world her debtor by her discoveries..."--Journal of Education, December 6, 1906, p 611. 

A Visionary and Somewhat Contradictory Peace Plan for Humanity (1927)

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"All [people] dream, but not equally."--T.E. Lawrence

Although this tall (13")0 pamphlet is rather short, it is a potential toothache to read. To that end I am not reporting on the contents, just the cover, which tells its own story.  This was printed in 1927, and was once owned by H.L. Mencken.  

The Great Passaic Textile Strike of 1926--H.L. Mencken's copy

 JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2705

This broadside was an appeal to like-minded people to contribute to a fund to help relieve thew dire conditions of textile worker strikers in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1926.  There were more than 16,000 people involved in this sometimes-brutal strike, people who were trying to stay even in their lives, looking for a little more money and a little better working conditions than what they had.  The Passiac (a working city just south of Patterson in an industrial triangle section of the state) strikers were moving against a number of textile (wool and silk) mills there, trying to force management to pay them something closer to the $1400 annual income for a family of four to survive. \

Most workers there were making $1,000-$1,200 a year ($800-$1,000 if the worker was a woman, and about half of them were) for 50+ hours of labor per week.  The result was that the workers could not afford good housing and food, and those disadvantages paid off in high rates of tuberculosis, very high incidence of child mortality, and a low average life expectancy.  The strike began slowly in January 1926, with the mills responding with vicious attacks by paid thugs and by police. 

[Measures 8.5x14"]

There's quite  a bit written on this strike, and most seem to say that it was an important event in the history of "labor relations", and that it was the first time that a Communist-led strike succeeded in the United States, (There is a complex legacy as to who the leadership was for this strike, but the end result is that, at the end, the Communists were in charge.)

But what I wanted to say here about this broadside was the communal effort involved with keeping the strikers (and the strike) going.  The strikers needed money to live, as there was certainly no money coming in, and since there was obviously no union, there was no general fund from which any of these families could draw food money from). they needed money just to buy food and pay for housing.  SO the call for "Give all you can!" and "Give right away!" were as desperate as they sounded.  My guess is that there would be a representative of the International Workers Aid society national office going from factory to factory, or door-to-door, soliciting for money for the Passaic workers' relief.  The strike was no doubt a very nasty business, with a victory only a victory once there was more food on the table, less illness, and far fewer babies dying from preventable causes. Probably this looked like a victory to others so far as the future of fair labor/pay was concerned, but not so much for the strikers who brought this about. 

It is also interesting to note that this copy was given at some point to H.L. Mencken, who gave it right away to the Library of Congress, where it wound up in a forgotten "Pamphlet Collection", and then sold to me (years afterwards).

This broadside was an appeal to like-minded people to contribute to a fund to help relieve thew dire conditions of textile worker strikers in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1926.  There were more than 16,000 people involved in this sometimes-brutal strike, people who were trying to stay even in their lives, looking for a little more money and a little better working conditions than what they had.  The Passiac (a working city just south of Patterson in an industrial triangle section of the state) strikers were moving against a number of textile (wool and silk) mills there, trying to force management to pay them something closer to the $1400 annual income for a family of four to survive. \

Most workers there were making $1,000-$1,200 a year ($800-$1,000 if the worker was a woman, and about half of them were) for 50+ hours of labor per week.  The result was that the workers could not afford good housing and food, and those disadvantages paid off in high rates of tuberculosis, very high incidence of child mortality, and a low average life expectancy.  The strike began slowly in January 1926, with the mills responding with vicious attacks by paid thugs and by police. 

[Measures 8.5x14"]

There's quite  a bit written on this strike, and most seem to say that it was an important event in the history of "labor relations", and that it was the first time that a Communist-led strike succeeded in the United States, (There is a complex legacy as to who the leadership was for this strike, but the end result is that, at the end, the Communists were in charge.)

But what I wanted to say here about this broadside was the communal effort involved with keeping the strikers (and the strike) going.  The strikers needed money to live, as there was certainly no money coming in, and since there was obviously no union, there was no general fund from which any of these families could draw food money from). they needed money just to buy food and pay for housing.  SO the call for "Give all you can!" and "Give right away!" were as desperate as they sounded.  My guess is that there would be a representative of the International Workers Aid society national office going from factory to factory, or door-to-door, soliciting for money for the Passaic workers' relief.  The strike was no doubt a very nasty business, with a victory only a victory once there was more food on the table, less illness, and far fewer babies dying from preventable causes. Probably this looked like a victory to others so far as the future of fair labor/pay was concerned, but not so much for the strikers who brought this about. 

It is also interesting to note that this copy was given at some point to H.L. Mencken, who gave it right away to the Library of Congress, where it wound up in a forgotten "Pamphlet Collection", and then sold to me (years afterwards).

Missing the Colors that Are Not There (1835)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2704

I don't know what there is in this engraving that speaks "color" to me when it should probably be just concerning itself with the blackness of its deep black (which for me is usually the case). Neither the blackness nor the dimensionality of the thing--it seems to give itself some height and depth at the same time--say anything louder than the representation of its missing colors, which we are clearly seeing nothing of in these wavelengths except that there really aren't any colors here outside of the beautiful black & white.  The contrast is certainly there (“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.” Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers), especially in the corner bits, where on closer inspection the blackness is really more white than black. In any event, the print suggests "color" to me for no good reason, except perhaps that it looks very cold, and cold is suggestive of ice blue, and the good contrast for that is yellow. “The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with base notes, or dark lake with the treble." so wrote Mr. Kandinsky, who saw colors in his sound, and who in the midst of things wrote four experimental pieces of theater based upon this observation, the first and perhaps most prominent of which was called "Yellow" (1909).  And that is why this old engraving seems "yellow" to me (and this without any benefit of synesthesia).

The image in question, from An Easy System of Astronomy, containing an explanation of the Moveable Planisphere, together with a selection of problems, maps &c, intended to either accompany the planisphere or may be used separately in schools. This little guy (14cm) was published in Philadelphia in 1835 and unfortunately does not make mention of any detail of the "planisphere" other than that there was one that could be used. (This is evidently relatively rare, with only two copies located in WorldCat/OCLC--Columbia and the National Observatory.) 

If there was an equal weight assigned to white and black, the white in the corner sections may well outweigh the black, which also happens to show the planet "Herschell". This was the first planet discovered since antiquity, and was done so by the Hannoverian Brit Friedrich Herschel, who found it in 1781 and who lived with its immediate fame for another 41 years until his death in 1822. Herschel, an enormous astronomical talent who also played and composed, proposed the planet be named  in fidelity "Georgium Sidus" after George III, though that name didn't stay on the planet longer than a quick shadow. The French astronomer Lalande (who could probably not for genetic /national reasons use the name for George) suggested the planet be named for the discoverer, "Herschell¹", which really wasn't that terribly popular though it did last for five or six decades, succumbing finally to Bode's suggestion of "Uranus". 

This is a folding illustration for the following, which here appears much larger than the thing is in its real life, standing as it does only about 5" (130mm) tall:

 

Notes

1.  From the entry "Uranus" from the Oxford English Dictionary:

1783   New Rev. Apr. 325   Notwithstanding Mr. Herschel's having named his planet the Georgium Sidus, Mr. Lalande persists in calling it the Herschel, Mr. Bode proposes Uranus, Mr. Sivry Cybele, and Mr. Prosperin, Neptune.

1802   O. G. Gregory Treat. Astron. 128   By some astronomers it is called Herschel, in honour of the discoverer; though among almost all foreigners, it has acquired the name of uranius, which it is likely to retain.

1830   Encycl. Metrop. III. 498/1   Both these appellations are, however, now nearly become extinct, that of Uranus being almost universally adopted

1860   D. Olmsted Mech. Heavens 267   Uranus was the remotest known planet..until the discovery of..Neptune.

1902   N. Amer. Rev. Aug. 225   Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are in too primal a state of fluidity and gaseousness to support life.

On Brain Light, Clairvoyants, and the Uselessness of X-Ray Photographs

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2703

• [The principles of light and color: including among other things the harmonic laws of the universe, the etherio-atomic philosophy of force, chromo chemistry, chromo therapeutics, and the general philosophy of the fine forces, together with numerous discoveries and practical applications, by Edwin Dwight Babbitt (1828-1905) chromopathologist and psychophysician, and published 1896.]

I must admit to only knowing this book by two dart throws--one that landed on page 495 (with its remarkable image) and then the other on page 56-0, very nearly the end of the book--and sometimes that is all you need, especially in this case, where all you really need is the title.  The author of this mega-themed title and the book that wrapped around its axle seems to promise something having to do with color/light therapeutics, or something, and I was pulled in for perhaps some entertaining pre-non-representational artwork, but I never got that far, stabbing away as I did in the copy on the Internet Archives, finding myself with a light-filled neuroanatomy drawing, and it s explanation.  Whatever the creative light that was reputedly displayed in this image had its existence and purpose proved by clairvoyants, which I don't often see too often in 19th century anatomies or physiologies.  Anyway, they were there, consulted (either near or far), and the case made, and thus the curtains drawn. I did like the drawing, though.

When I went to see how the book closed out, I found an addendum on the "so-called Roentgen or X Rays", which the author says he discovered and wrote about in the first edition of this work back in 1878. He makes some complimentary remarks about the work of Crookes and Edison in this field (the x-ray being discovered in 1895), but then goes on to fuss about the unnecessary use of photography with the x-ray, finding it gratuitous and wasteful. Using your eyes in real time and not a photo was his choice, and that was that, the author ending by saying "I am done with the photographic end of it, entirely", which no doubt places him in a highly restricted group of people looking at the future of the x-ray.  

[Image source: Full text: https://archive.org/details/principlesofligh00babb]

The explanation of the image of brain light:

On the Registration of All "Mental Defectives" (1931)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2702

Here's a title that should stop you: 

How very special.

Of course, it was 1931, and the Eugenicists were running free and easy, the stiff wind of their convictions running freely through their imaginary hair...and what would we all do with this gathering of information on mental defectives¹ once that was done? And what was the definition of mental defective, anyway? thirdly of course--what do we do with the mental defectives once this energy of definition and collection had been done?  well, a new group would come to power in two years' time from the publication of this article, and in their own right they did these things and then decided to kill many of the people that they cataloged. That's one example. I'm not saying that the well-meaning people like the author of this paper would be anywhere near this horrible, not at all; I just don't know why they would want to gather this information.  There wasn't a discussion of collection of treatment of these people, just their registration in one large database. Every time I see in this pamphlet the statement on the need for such a registry, I expect to see why--but that never comes, only the repetition of a phrase like "that a central registry for mental defectives is desirable, and that it should be organized and operated by an established state department" and its variations.

Finally, at the end of the short 14-page pamphlet, in the final paragraph, something appears close to explaining the "why" issue--but it winds up being a little tautological, stating that the need for gathering the names of all mental defectives is "to make available authorized agencies and individuals definite information on known mental defectives"

Basically--at least so far as this pamphlet explains--the reason for gathering all of these names into a system of state-wide databases is to have the names in state-wide databases. 

Notes:

1. Mental defective seems to make its first appearance in English in 1899, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: 

The Highways of Tomorrow 1937 (and 1938)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2701

The future--as presented in the following two pamphlets--was coming, and it was guided on a 100'-wide flat ribbon of cement, with a life-blood moving along it at 45 mph.  It is presented by Frank Sheets (president of the American Association of State Highway Officials), and the world looked like the cement that would be produced and purchased from the publisher of this pamphlet, the Portland Cement Company. And they'd be right, there would need to be something for the exploding auto market to get to and fro on the expanding horizon of city- and suburb-spread. To that end there exists in this work a proposal for 3 million miles of highways at a cost of $57,000,000,000, which was equal to about 75% of the entire budget of the U.S. government. It was a big plan--the proposal itself can't be found in the pamphlet.

[Source: Frank T. Sheets, The Highway of Tomorrow, Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Greater New York Safety Council at Hotel Astor in New York City, April 14, 1937.] 

Another vision of the future A Dream, a Reality" and/or "Coast to Coast Transcontinental Super Highway isn't actually the title of this work even though they are on the cover; it is mostly a caption for an interior image though it somehow percolated topside.  The real title is The Highway of Tomorrow made Possible by the Ideal of Today, which gets to the subject of the work even though it is slightly unwieldy. It is difficult to say who wrote this though Mr. T.E. Steiner ("Sponsor", of Wooster, Ohio) and which somehow found its way to a fourth edition in its two years of existence, published and promoted in undoubtedly small numbers by the "Transcontinental Stream-Lined Super Highway of the United States of America" in 1938.

This is all about super-highways, and mainly replacing the old roads with four new roads that are as straight as straight could be. A map of the proposals features one line of the highway is straight from San Francisco to Boston; another from Laredo, Texas (!) direct to International Falls, Minnesota (!);  a third not-straight shot from Boston-Allentown-near-Valdosta Ga-Miami; and another from near-Valdosta to Cleveland. A schematic of this map though drops near-Valdosta for Jacksonville, and has the Boston-Miami route further east to include NYC and D.C., which are omitted from the map.  Ah, well.

I think that the author--an accomplished "business man" was was the head of a "manufacturing company" in Ohio and a coal company in West Virginia (and "employer of labor") --was not much of an engineer, because the plan ignores topography and the highway design itself is pretty bad, especially the parts on exit/entrance (which the author takes particular care to note are separately copyrighted (?)) bits, which are killers. 

In any event, the super highway extending into the clouds on the cover is all I'm here for.  Mr. Steiner no doubt attracted some attention for the project because of the enormous pork and public works potential, what with the building of 6,000 miles or whatever of an 8-lane highway, which is billions of square feet of paving times some multiplier.  So a lot of money would be spent, which means, well, a lot of possible interest--after all, it did get so far as a hearing before the Committee on Roads, U.S. House of Representatives, on May 18, 1937.

This no doubt was a "visionary"proposal of some sort, though the engineering aspects of it were more imaginary than anything else. 

 

 

Name, Rank, and Serial Number (1945, with the Audio for the Radio Play)

JF Ptak Science Books

Name, Rank, and Serial Number is a tough-love drama produced by Du Pont ("Better things for better living...through chemistry") for the Cavalcade of America, sharing the critical importance of leaked and mistakenly volunteered information and the foul end that might come to. The play was based on a training film for the USAAF called "resisting Enemy Interrogation", which was one of certainly hundreds of such films produced by the armed forces during the war to try and prepare members of the military for situations A to Z. Name, Rank, Serial Number was the public demonstration of one of these films, and this slim pamphlet contains the script. There is nothing quite like listening to the original, though, which can be found on the American University Digital Archive site, here: http://auislandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/hickman%3A250

This is the story of four captured U.S. airmen  in a German POW camp, and how they faced skillful and then brutal interrogators, and how even the smallest bit of misspoken or half-volunteered mistake can lead to terrible consequences. 

 

A Lovely Printer's Device Honoring the Sciences (1724)

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Newly arrived here and new to my experience are some volumes of the journal Suite des Memoires de Mathematique et de Physique tirez des Registers d e l'Academie Royale des Sciences, a significant and beautifully-designed series of books which are small (only about 16cm) and very light, and their fine binding makes the book feel "correct" in your hands. I'll be writing quite a bit about what I find in them over the next weeks and months, but the very first thing that stopped me was the scientific instrument-laden printer's device on the title page--this the work of Pierre de Coup, of Amsterdam. The original is only about 3" square (35x60mm), but it presents an abundant allegorical punch in a tiny space:

 

And the full page:

 

 

I can identify most of the instruments around the putti: right in the middle of it all is a crest with a blazing sun, no doubt indicating the reign of holy light on the impact of science and mathematics; to its rear and left is a telescope and to the right is a drawing table with a considerable balancing weight. One of the putti cuts a bit of the potted plant on the right, while another on the left works on a globe with a set of dividers (and may actually be standing on the plans of a fort).  The putto in the center (with an armillary sphere just behind him?) works on some sort of drawing, and looks down and away to the right. Additionally there are some bits an pieces: a right angle, a cauldron, perhaps an alembic, though I don't know what that T-shaped instrument (on the right) is, or the clock-like-looking clock-like device at top-central...and I'm not sure why the bellows is figured so prominently (except for symbolic reasons). 

For a full run of the journal see the Gallica site, here: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32786820s/date

Octopusiana: the Failure of the Bank of the United States (the White House copy) 1931

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

William Sternberg.  Finis. The Bank of the United States, 1913-1930.  No publisher or place of publication listed, though copyrighted by William H. Sternberg, 1931, and "distributed " by National Distributors. 23x15.5cm, 40pp. Highly decorated cover. Original wrappers.  Provenance:  the White House, and then the Library of Congress (stamped "by transfer/The White House, Jul 29 1931". Very Good copy, with the LC surplus/duplicate stamp on rear cover, and a 6mm perforated "LC" stamp at the very bottom of the title page.  

I was about to say that not many books have started their lives with the word "Finis" starting the title--a quick check in WorldCat has proved this wrong, as there at least hundreds of books with this word in the title. 

The cover art--perhaps by Sternberg?--is very striking, and as with lots of political art, could be understood without having to read it, a glancing view being pretty much enough to tell the story.  The image features the Bank of the United States as a sort of 16-legged octopus, being fed money food from a merger/depositor pitcher, underneath which and perhaps keeping the whole thing afloat are a banker, lawyer, and politician. Sternberg evidently didn't think much of the BOUS' many acquisitions/mergers since it went into business in 1913, being particularly upset with the late 1920's movements. Anyway this is a pretty screedy diatribe, though it also seems to be an informed one. 

A Series of Unfortunate Events led to an infamous run on the BOUS' Bronx branch, with 25,000 people showing up and wanting their deposits, all of which fed into the making of the Great Depression. The bank did not do well after the run.