JF Ptak Science Books

A Map of Drunken England (1908)

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And so, here we are, my first ever encounter with a map of drunken England, printed in the Illustrated London News om March 7, 1908.  As a data visualization element in a pretty buttoned-up periodical printed during a pretty buttoned-up period, it carries a provocative title using "Drunken" and "England".  

The subtitle reads: "the proportion of convictions for drunkenness relative to the population of the counties and county boroughs in one year". It continues: "the further north one goes the greater the increase in insobriety, and these statistical tables, based upon the Government Blue Book, afford a most remarkable proof of the fact. In the southern counties, except London, the convictions are comparatively light, but in the mining and industrial districts the percentage becomes heavy. For the purposes of the diagram the standard has been fixed relatively to every 10,000 of the population, and the correct proportion, represented by so many bottles..."  

Hammer, Sickle, Skull (1919)

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Here's a very provocative piece of design meant to equate death and communism--and in that there is no question.  Sowjet-Rußlands wahres Gesicht, aus eigener Anschauung und Erfahrung geschildert von drei einst begeisterten Kommunisten,  ("The Real Face of Communism, as Told from the Personal Experiences and Intuition of Three Once-Enthusiastic Communists") was written by Friedrich Oskar Kloetzner in 1919 in the bad days of early social struggle that led to the bad days of middle and later struggle and then Apocalypse. Here, in 1919, just after the end of the war, the great supposed golem was Communism--that would of course morph and change and accommodate other fears and hatred, but for now, there were things needed to fill the vacuum left by defeat and the coming of a bad peace, and the Communists served to fill at least one of the many niches to come. 

 

 

Notes:

The pamphlet measures 7x5",  and is paginated 223-256. Provenance: Library of Congress.  This has a funny record in WorldCat—there seem to be 21 results in the search on this title, though this looks like a cataloging error--for all of the different “references” there are only eight libraries locating copies of this pamphlet, with half of those in Europe.) 

 

A Fine RADAR Map of NYC, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books

The history of RADAR (RAdio Deection And Ranging, and something I've always written in caps, for whatever that is worth) is absolutely not what I'm thinking about now--that is a long story with lots of twists and turns, complicated, complex--and it ranges depending upon location as for the most part RADAR (from the 1930's anyway) was developed in secret, kept as a military secret.  And that's because it was a very important development, with the victor of the Battle of the Beams being the possible victor, period.  

All I want to do presently is note the significance of this particular pamphlet in the history of RADAR. This work was printed by PHILCO Corporation, (and dated December, 1945), and has an inserted leaflet stating that this "makes public for the first time the salient facts about the Corporation's development and production of airborne radar equipment for the United States Army and Navy".  PHILCO and other companies made significant contributions to the war capacity of the Allied forces, and--for this company in particular--much of that went unknown for quite some time afterwards, and of course there are some stories that just won't get told. But for PHILCO the story gets told here.  

This is also a fabulous nighttime map of NYC--produced by RADAR.  

[RADAR on Wings, Philco, 1945.  10x8", 30pp (unpaginated) with lots of photographs and an occasional schematic.]

The history of RADAR (RAdio Deection And Ranging, and something I've always written in caps, for whatever that is worth) is absolutely not what I'm thinking about now--that is a long story with lots of twists and turns, complicated, complex--and it ranges depending upon location as for the most part RADAR (from the 1930's anyway) was developed in secret, kept as a military secret.  And that's because it was a very important development, with the victor of the Battle of the Beams being the possible victor, period.  

All I want to do presently is note the significance of this particular pamphlet in the history of RADAR. This work was printed by PHILCO Corporation, (and dated December, 1945), and has an inserted leaflet stating that this "makes public for the first time the salient facts about the Corporation's development and production of airborne radar equipment for the United States Army and Navy".  PHILCO and other companies made significant contributions to the war capacity of the Allied forces, and--for this company in particular--much of that went unknown for quite some time afterwards, and of course there are some stories that just won't get told. But for PHILCO the story gets told here.  

This is also a fabulous nighttime map of NYC--produced by RADAR.  

[RADAR on Wings, Philco, 1945.  10x8", 30pp (unpaginated) with lots of photographs and an occasional schematic.]

We Can't See Martians Because We Can't See Them (1944)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2725

Mr. Cyr made some very wide and radical remarks and observations in this pamphlet on life on Mars¹, which he is convinced exists, and on an advanced level. The problem is that we can only see the results of the civilization, and not the society itself. The Martians, I (quickly and haphazardly) read can't be seen because they can't be seen ("like atoms"), "only the collective efforts of Martians are visible".  And some of the "collective efforts" of the Martians can't be seen, either, like the canals (which run 1000' deep and cross the planet)  which are invisible not because they are so small as to be invisible, but rather it is due to the vegetation growing on their walls that obscure the structures themselves. The canals are also filled with water, or they are canyonlands, with animals using them as a highway. In another found paragraph we are told that "two or more craters near each other have an economic effect on Martian inhabitants", which must give rise to speculation of some sort.  And in my last bit of random reading, I saw that the canal networks of Ascraeus Lucas ("the Wall Street of Mars") are more than likely built upon earlier trails, and that "the only comparable highway network on earth [sic] is that radiating outwards from Indianapolis". 

It seems that Mr. Cyr was an observer of Mars, and then went well beyond the observable to make his deeper observations.  

Also in 1944 Mr. Cyr printed the oxymoronic Saturn Has Rings. Sometimes publications have absolutely no pretense, stating exactly what it is that sleeps between their covers. And sometimes these titles seem more like declarative broadsides or posters and not books at all, the "book part", or any writing furthering the cover's statement,  being unnecessary, their contents being obvious. This other work by Mr. Cyr is a good example, the title of which begs the response "Yup!".  Saturn Has Rings, should've stopped at the end of the title of chapter one, "A Rose has Petals", and probably could have ended on the title page.  But no, it didn't, and stretched itself over another fifty thin pages.

 

Notes:

Technocracy, Debt, and the Glorious Inferno

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There's was something striking in this representation of Big Money and the Common People that reminded me of other inverted pyramids. The weight of debt image appears on the back cover of what might well be an Outsider approach to reorganizing society, created  by William H. Smyth and surfaced in a number of slim pamphlets in the 1920's and '30's. Smyth is all but forgotten save for the word he coined--"Technocracy"--which itself is not too-well remembered; Technocracy itself was a form of (somehow) democratic form of government ruled by engineers and scientists, and so on, who would somehow relieve us all of the tremendous burden of national debt.  And since this particular pamphlet Technocracy Explained by its Originator William H. Smyth (and then re-titled on the next page as Technocracy by its Originator Reorganization of National Energy Aim of Theory [sic] was printed in 1933 in a particularly bad year of the Great Depression, Smyth might have attracted a number of other-involved citizens who were now paying attention for some sort of anything that might relieve society of its monetary golem. 

In any event, the image on the rear cover was pretty striking, though I can't find reference to it in the text (even though there is a reference here to this book itself, a piece of advertising in the book that someone has already found and perhaps purchased). It reminds me slightly of something else, a popular renaissance depiction of Dante's inferno, by Sandro Botticelli:

[Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sandro_Botticelli_-_La_Carte_de_l%27Enfer.jpg]

It is common to see the Inferno structured this way, as is the depiction of debt heaped on the back of ordinary people, another inverted pyramid--now that I said that, I can't think of another image. That said, I know it has nothing to do with the pyramid on the U.S. one dollar bill, as that didn't make its first appearance for another two years after the Smyth paper. So there's that.  

On Children's Games in NYC, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2724

It was the provocative and strong cover art was the work of Maurice Becker, 1889-1975, ( who "...was a radical political artist best known for his work in the 1910s and 1920s for such [seminal] publications as The Masses and The Liberator"--Wikipedia) that drew me into this pamphlet. John Collier's¹ The City Where Crime is Play, a Report by The People's Institute² is a slim pamphlet with an odd and I thought metaphorical title, though it turns out that this is exactly the subject of the work. Collier collected data from 400 or more collectors who made what sounds like fairly unscientific surveys of children's games in the Middle West Side of Manhattan on how kids played and the possible connection between that "play" and crime. He evidently finds something there, some sort of correlation that I do not understand and really don't need to, presently, though the games that he collected where of interest. In general though The People's Institute and Collier worked for the social welfare, and especially so for immigrants (Collier going on to become the Commissioner of Indian Affairs under FDR), and perhaps this was a simple work to parents on keeping a watchful eye out on the kids so that their play didn't veer into truancy, or something along those lines.

 

In some ways the listing of children's games and gamey-truancy and petty crimes, as well as the quality of the morality of their play puts me in mind of the vast and complex paintings of the Netherlandish Renaissance master Brueghel the elder in depicting the very busy town life and children's games of 16th c Holland. The 80 or so identified games in the Brueghel are indeed games, and is a more complete identifier of children's activities in 1560 than the lists that appear in the Collier work.  Sending out hundreds of people to observe or question kids about the games they were playing on the streets of Manhattan in 1914 sounds a bit like a time capsule, and so the connection to Brueghel, who definitely painted a time capsule encyclopedia of the games children played.Collier's is not nearly as complete, and Brueghel made no connection to crime 

Notes

1. John Collier (May 4, 1884 – May 8, 1968), a sociologist and writer, was an American social reformer and Native American advocate. He served as Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, from 1933 to 1945. He was chiefly responsible for the "Indian New Deal," especially the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, through which he intended to reverse a long-standing policy of Cultural assimilation of Native Americans.” “From 1907 to 1919, he worked as secretary of the People's Institute, where he developed programs for immigrant neighborhoods, emphasizing pride in their traditions, sponsoring lectures and pageants, and political awareness...”--Wikipedia

2. "The People's Institute was founded in 1897 by Charles Sprague Smith to teach the theory and practice of government and social philosophy to workers and recent immigrants in New York City. It sponsored lectures, classes, concerts, and other community activities at Cooper Union and throughout New York City, though principally on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The Institute ceased operations in 1934. The People's Institute is recognized most often for its contribution as a community educational center for working class adults and immigrants. It sponsored lectures, craft guilds, art and music leagues, a training school for community workers, and adult education classes in history, social science, literature, as well as nutrition and health...The Advisory Council comprised over forty [strong]  individuals including Lyman Abbott, R.R. Bowker, Nicholas Butler Murray, Andrew Carnegie, R.W. Gilder, Samuel Gompers, Jacob A. Riis, Jacob H. Schiff, Anson Phelps Stokes, J.G. Phelps Stokes, Oscar S. Straus, and Lillian D. Wald."--Historical note on the People's Institute Archives at the NYPL. 

The Effigies of Sidney Greenstreet, The Beaver, and Raymond Loewy: from B+W to Color (1944)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2723

Here's another in this series of fabulous color in 1930's and mid-1940's designs, and the third from the Armstrong Cork Company and their sales pamphlets for their linoleum flooring (Better Floors for Better Business, printed in Lancaster, Pa.).  As I've said earlier, it is somewhat jarring to see these designs in color when we're so trained from the pre-color movies to see them in all of their tremendous facets of black & white mixes. It is hard to think of Sidney Greenstreet gliding across a room or through a restaurant that is bathed in nothing but shades of gray, when in fact he could've been wearing a brilliant plum-colored suit and moving across a flaming red floor. And in this case, with Armstrong, they did indeed make flaming red flooring--and in stark contrasts with yellows and blue designs.

So I decided this time to take five examples of these designs and contrast them in color and then in black and white--it is an interesting little exercise in expectation and what our heads have been trained to see in old films. (All of the color images are as found in the Armstrong catalog--no enhancement.)

So, for example, the Hotel Pennsylvania coffee shop, NYC (a Raymond Loewy design!), as expected:

And then, the shock of non-recognition (apologies to Edmund Wilson and William Gaddis):

Unexpected, no?  It reminds me of seeing a b+w episode of Leave it to Beaver, where the Beaver buys himself a suit and his parents are completely done-in by its color, which of course on the tv looked like pretty much everything else. 

Here's four more, including Postman's Specialty Shop, 5th Ave, NYC:

A Scientific/Industrial Vision of the Future City (1842)

JF Ptak Science Books  2723

 Amédé Couder wrote L'Architecture et l'industrie comme moyen de perfection sociale, a fine work that was published in Paris (by Brockhaus et Avenarius) in 1842.  The work presents Couder's rather stroing visionary plans for a perfect city of industrial and scientific harmony, laid out in suggestively-fractal harmony, with the suggestions of a Renaissance-laden snowflake design. Whatever it was, it was beautiful to look at, at least on paper, though I'm not so certain that I'd care to live in the canyonlands of stone and shadow on the other side of the garden wall of the perfect scientific-industrial conclave. 

The Beauty of Speed in Chess Notation

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2723

In the occasionally speedy and occasionally not-speedy world of chess, it may sometimes be necessary to take speedy-or-not notes, and one attempt to address this need was made by Herbert E. Salzer in his non-mysteriously titled Chess Shorthand (1971).  Chess notation--like algebraic notation (in different iterations), English notation, ICCF notation, and so on--can reach back hundreds of years. Even the shorthand approach tried out here in mathematician Salzer's short work dips back into the 19th century (‘Shorthand Notation" by M. Barnard, a short entry in  Chess Player’s Annual and Club Directory, 1893-94 by Mr and Mrs T.B. Rowland, London, 1893). But the Salzer work is really pretty interesting, and so I thought to at least surface the work.

The thing is is that Salzer's work has a certain autonomous, musical, simple splendor to it--that or it has the feel of a cipher (or a double cipher). Here's an example:\
On second thought a shorthand for chess at first (or second) blush doesn't really seem terribly necessary, given the brevity of the notation that already exists or existed. The author though is convinced that such an effort was needed, or at least wanted the intellectual exercise of creating such a thing, and provides in twelve packed pages the foundations of recording chess moves quickly, if not inconveniently. The notation the author creates reminds me somewhat of Gregg shorthand, but not as much as alien written communication system, being mostly soft lines and bumps. More striking is that as soon as these abbreviated symbols are introduced, the abbreviations' abbreviations appear. In the attempt to make things less complicated this system may complicate things—maybe not, because I really can't tell. Perhaps if you became fluid and fluent in the new symbolic language the Salzer system becomes a godsend, or perhaps not. I can appreciate the thinking and the work, and the interesting road that the author took to his shortcut, but I've never been good at those, once taking a “shortcut” to a location directly south of me and finally getting to it 3x-longer than usual, getting to the place going north. All that said, I respect this work, though I really don't understand it--in a certain way Mr. Salzer created a work of art in creating his writing system. 

 

 

Burroughs, Batman, and Bullets in the History of Holes and Punched Card Computation

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2722

There is a continuing thread on this blog on The History of Holes--it is a series about, well,  holes and what isn't in them/what used to be in them/what you can see through them, and so on. This particular section of holes relates to the control and distribution of data and the great efficacy of utilizing holes punched into cards which would be arranged and tabulated in such a way as to order and manipulate mountains of data.  That said I don't recall seeing anything in print from the heyday of keypunching that actually mentioned the holes, as it does here--nor have I seen a non-William-Burroughs connection made between handguns, bullets, holes, and tabulation. Oddly enough, there is a connection with a crime fighter who didn't use a gun and whose sidekick used the exclamation "Holy ______ (computer, etc., and no expletives). And so we get to unite punched cards, computers, W.S. Burroughs, Batman, and The Time Tunnel.  (The Time Tunnel?--yes indeed, the tv show from the 60's can be brought into this as well..)

This is one of the first pages in a promotional pamphlet entitled Your Opportunity with the Maintenance Service Department Tabulating Machines Division of Remington Rand (ca. 1935-40). The title is stubby and factual, and the company was putting out a feeler for future engineering employees who could be trained to service and repair the many machines produced by Remington Rand that could be found in a largish business. 

Remington Rand at one time was Remington Arms, and then diversified to produce all manner of light and heavy electrical goods (and of course famously producing the standard U.S. Army sidearm, the 45-calber Remington M1911 pistol), and by the end of WWII the company produced a vast line of tabulating equipment (of another order of high caliber).  Interestingly the pamphlet exclaims that a person working for RR could work there for as long as they wanted, that the company was there to stay.  

Certainly the company would hang on for some time in one form or another, but the tabulating card division was about to change drastically.  In 1950 RR purchased Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company (ENIAC) and a few years later (1952) secured another giant computer pioneer, Engineering Research Associates (ERA), making Remington Rand about the largest computer company in the world. RR would be purchased a few years later by Sperry in 1955, becoming Sperry Rand, and then simply Sperry a short time after that; later, in 1986, Sperry would merge with Burroughs and become Unisys. Somewhere in there all of these tabulating machine repairmen and techs hired fresh in 1946 would be out of their lifetime job less than a decade later.  

Now back to William S. Burroughs--the gun/tabulating connection there is that Mr. Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife in a game of "William Tell"--he is also the grandson of William Seward Burroughs of Burroughs Adding/Tabulating Machine and computer mainframe fame. (Burroughs was founded in 1886 and became Burroughs Corp in 1953 and was one of the nine major computer manufacturers in the U.S. 100 years after its founding Burroughs Corp merged with Sperry--which had absorbed Remington Rand--to become Unisys.) 

On to The Batman of the 1960's tv show where the connection between punched holes and "holy" is obvious and obscure--the caped crusader and Robin used a Burroughs computer (the B205) in the Batcave. The same goes for The Time Tunnel, where we see another use of the B205, used to enable the intrepid time travelers to jump into their funnel-shaped time machine and dive into a hole in time much like Harry Potter at platform 9 ^3/4.   I suspect that there are more examples, but I'll stop here.

• (A big salute to the "Starring the Computer" website, which has an extensive list of the B205 appearing in movies and television: http://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=45  as well as a very long list of appearances of many other non-fictional computers. It is an excellent effort!)

Lastly, some illustrations from the pamphlet, which surpisingly does not show up at all in WorldCat/OCLC.

 

["Typical office installations of Remington Rand equipment"]

How Did One Keep Ice Icey in the Summer of 1845?

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 I cam upon this curious drawing in The American Agriculturalist for July 1845.  "Ice-House" it was, and the accompanying text described how this design was found to be among the most perfect. There is even a recommendation for the design from a gentleman in Virginia, a summertime recommendation from a moist and steamy environment. The author described how well the building worked, built into the side of a hill with a 12-foot-square pit dug 14' down, and how the bottom of the pit was never revealed, even after eight summers of ice and heat...there was always something cold down in the hole. 

I wonder how old the oldest ice was in the state of Virginia or any other hot place, how old the oldest unrefrigerated ice may have been? The thought would be that you would just need to keep adding ice, but that other ice needed to come from somewhere, and in 1845 that "somewhere" may have been nowhere at all--after all if the ice didn't melt then we would have a significant problem with the laws of the universe. 

And the full text, with descriptions on how to construct the ice house: 

 

[Click to expand.]

Black & White in Color, Part V

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This is another installment in a series on putting color into what we normally would think of in terms of black and white photos (and movies)--the results are sometimes surprising and unusual. (There are posts here on the color schemes on 1930's schoolrooms in Cleveland, air recon in color, color dissonance in 1940's bathrooms, colorless color charts, and other such bits, all findable by entering "color black and white" int he Google search box.)  The pamphlet below would sound like a simple and badly-titled publication (How to Plan Walls that Please, by Armstrong Cork Products, 1938) if you were just reading about it in a catalog, but in real life, it is a symphony of exploding and unexpected color. At first the color combinations had a somewhat claustrophobic effect, but I think it was mostly because the rooms were small and densely packed--once that is accounted for, the colors seemed to take on a welcoming attitude...especially in the kitchens, where you'd expect to sit down at one of those small tables and wait for Grandma to serve you some fresh pie.  

In any event, here are some examples for the pamphlet:

A Unique Copy of a Rorschach Test Interpretation Tool (1947)?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2721

Yesterday I wrote about a problem I was having in understanding a difficult-to-understand document on applying a computer in creating a bibliography of meteorology from 1949. Today the nature of the object is just completely outside anything I know about, and I thought if I posted something here and other palces in the Great Social Media that someone out there in Webtopia will know exactly what this thing is.

The subject here is a paper by Dr. George Ulett called A Rapid Method of Rorschach Analysis, which was created in 1947. The whole production is obviously home-made, the text being some generation of carbon copy from the typed original, with the “calculator” or rapid-method template being hand made. I can find no evidence in WorldCat/OCLC that this work was published as it stands. I also cannot tell if it was incorporated in a later work. I also cannot tell its utility, but given Dr. Ulett's achievements in the field, and particularly within the Rorschach specialty, he must have seen a use for this tool.

 

And the notes on the reverse of the Rorschach tool:

Notes:

Ulett, George A.: “...former director of the Missouri Division of Mental Diseases where, under his leadership, Missouri went from one of the worst-funded mental health programs to a national leader. He founded what is now the Missouri Institute of Mental Health. He was former medical director of St. Louis City's Malcom Bliss Hospital. He was instrumental in setting up alcohol and drug abuse treatment programs at city and state hospitals. One of his proudest achievements was to bring racial integration to the city's mental health system. He was a professor of psychiatry at Washington University, Directory of Psychiatry at Deaconess Hospital, and was in private practice for over three decades.”from obituary at Legacy dot com

Dr. Ulett was also the author of books and numerous papers, including a number on the Rorschach test, including: Rorschach workbook : a primer for the psychiatrist, with interpretive diagram to permit clinical use while learning the ink-blot test, 1948, and Rorschach introductory manual : a self-teaching primer of Rorschach for the clinical psychiatric worker, 1960.

 (Provenance: Library of Congress, undoubtedly from the author, received May 1947. From the "Pamphlet Collections", and stamped on the title page with the LC/ surplus/duplicate stamp. 11x8.5”, 18, 2, pp, plus a plastic-encased (though retrievable) cardboard hole-punched enumerator for recording Rorschach responses. GVC bound in manila wrappers, both of which are detached, though present.)

Yesterday I wrote about a problem I was having in understanding a difficult-to-understand document on applying a computer in creating a bibliography of meteorology from 1949. Today the nature of the object is just completely outside anything I know about, and I thought if I posted something here and other palces in the Great Social Media that someone out there in Webtopia will know exactly what this thing is.

The subject here is a paper by Dr. George Ulett called A Rapid Method of Rorschach Analysis, which was created in 1947. The whole production is obviously home-made, the text being some generation of carbon copy from the typed original, with the “calculator” or rapid-method template being hand made. I can find no evidence in WorldCat/OCLC that this work was published as it stands. I also cannot tell if it was incorporated in a later work. I also cannot tell its utility, but given Dr. Ulett's achievements in the field, and particularly within the Rorschach specialty, he must have seen a use for this tool.

 

And the notes on the reverse of the Rorschach tool:

Notes:

Ulett, George A.: “...former director of the Missouri Division of Mental Diseases where, under his leadership, Missouri went from one of the worst-funded mental health programs to a national leader. He founded what is now the Missouri Institute of Mental Health. He was former medical director of St. Louis City's Malcom Bliss Hospital. He was instrumental in setting up alcohol and drug abuse treatment programs at city and state hospitals. One of his proudest achievements was to bring racial integration to the city's mental health system. He was a professor of psychiatry at Washington University, Directory of Psychiatry at Deaconess Hospital, and was in private practice for over three decades.”from obituary at Legacy dot com

Dr. Ulett was also the author of books and numerous papers, including a number on the Rorschach test, including: Rorschach workbook : a primer for the psychiatrist, with interpretive diagram to permit clinical use while learning the ink-blot test, 1948, and Rorschach introductory manual : a self-teaching primer of Rorschach for the clinical psychiatric worker, 1960.

 (Provenance: Library of Congress, undoubtedly from the author, received May 1947. From the "Pamphlet Collections", and stamped on the title page with the LC/ surplus/duplicate stamp. 11x8.5”, 18, 2, pp, plus a plastic-encased (though retrievable) cardboard hole-punched enumerator for recording Rorschach responses. GVC bound in manila wrappers, both of which are detached, though present.)

On Expanding the Boundaries of Things I Don't Know

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2720

Here's a good example of "where do I go with this puzzle now?" from the daily work that I do. The stages in working with odd material like the following goes from (1) recognizing that this junky-looking bit isn't nothing; (2) identifying the something in the nothing that an outsider like me can recognize; (3) figuring out where the thing might fit in context with its development of whatever; (4) seeing how it may or may not be significant in the development of its subject; and (5) trying to figure out if I know what I was talking about in #s 1-4 (this is usually the most difficult step). In an event, I worked with something just now where it seemed to strike interesting chords along several areas, but in the end I was back at the beginning.  

The item in mind is an early application of computers in forming a bibliographic meteorological database: Final Report of Bibliographic Section of Cooperative Research Project Between the U.S. Weather Bureau and North Carolina State College, which was produced in 1949 in 11 sheets, 9 of which are blueprints of text (including“Final Report...” pp 1-6, “Appendix 2 [sic], Meteorological Factor Codes”, 3pp).  Also included is a sample IBM card mock-up with hand-printed notation.  It is accompanied by an extensive two-page cover letter explaining the bibliography project in some detail, and was written by Reuben M. Harding (“assistant statistician”) on the UNC at Raleigh Institute of Statistics letterhead. (The director and associate directors were all heavy hitter statisticians, including Gertrude Cox, William Cochran, and Harold Hotelling.)  The letter is dated March 11, 1949, and written to Jack Haynes (“Basic Sciences Division, Biological Department, Chemical Corps, Camp Detrick”. “Camp Detrick” was named so from “Detrick Field” in 1943, and became after great expansion in Biowar “Fort Detrick” in 1953.) I cannot find out anything about Harding save for his dates (1919-1997) and I found nothing on Mr. Haynes, though given the nature of Fort Detrick, this does not surprise me at all, as those guys--being at the center of biological and chemical weaponry establishment in the U.S.--were doing work that generally was not published or publicly shared.

Basically it seems that Haynes wrote to Harding for general information on creating database on punch cards, though not necessarily for meteorological purposes. There is a mention for example of “battlefield conditions” which would not necessarily appear in a meteorological bibliography, but there is no hint in the letter at all regarding the ultimate applied interest of Detrick might've been. So my guess is that Haynes was interested in structure and not content. Harding responds mostly outlining the weaknesses of his project, though this critique is very highly useful in itself, and for all I know may have been the most significant contribution of the entire affair. 

Here's the cover letter, which makes for interesting reading in itself, with some good insight on how to convey information on a proposed project and what the troublesome issues were--it is worth a read from that perspective alone.

And the first page of the blueprinted document:

And the punch card mock-up:

And so, it was an interesting time figuring out some of the parts of this document, but after everything was said and done, I really didn't know where I was. The document itself didn't show up as a published entity in WorldCat, and general academic searches revealed nothing of use on my early attempts, which means all I have thus far are discrete bits of information, explaining more deeply what I don't know. Sometimes these things are a challenge, and sometimes they need to be let go, in spite of the convincingly-interesting bits that surround them.  We'll see what happens to this...

And speaking of things that I don't know, I'm not even sure what post number this really is--I say "2720" but I think in the last few hundred numbered post I've lost my numerical way, and I'm not positive of what number I am up to. It gets more confusing as there are unnumbered "quick posts", which number probably now about 2k, and since there can be 5 or 10 or more of them spaced between numbered posts, I sometimes just forget what number I am pushing against. 

Writing on the Clouds

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2719

 “Euery Cloud engenders not a Storme.”--Shakespeare, Henry VI, Pt. 3 (1623) v. iii. 10

 “Vapour, previously unseen, makes its appearance as cloud, or mist, or fog.”--T. H. Huxley Physiogr. (ed. 2) 40  

"But Howard gives us with his clearer mind
The gain of lessons new to all mankind;
That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp,
He first has gain’d, first held with mental grasp.
Defin’d the doubtful, fix’d its limit-line,
And named it fitly.—Be the honour thine!
As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall,
Let the world think of thee who taught it all."--Goethe, "Howards Ehrengedächtnis", 1821

The great cloud pioneer Luke Howard (1772-1864) first published on his cloud classifications in his papers "On the Modifications of Clouds and on the Principles of their Production Suspension and Destruction being the Substance of an Essay read before the Askesian¹ Society in the Session 1802-3" in 1803, launching him from general normal obscurity into the ranks of the internationally known. He had done what Aristotle and many others down the years hadn't--classified (his "Modifications" of the title of his 11k-word effort) the moving mountains in the sky, making him a Linnaeus/Godfather of clouds, his nomenclature quickly adopted worldwide. 

Howard, a pharmacist/chemist/meteorologist² invoked a Latin nomenclature for his classification, which was a very smart idea, as Latin was already Latin (as it were) and didn't need to face the difficulties and obstructions of being translated into other languages, as was the case with the problematic Lamarckian system introduced just a year earlier which was phrased out in French and which encountered many problems in translation. Howard's universal nomenclature and his creative and poetic descriptions following deep study and endless sketches³ created a static environment from what was seen as an impossibly dynamic flow of changes in the structure of clouds.

According to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (the entry written by Richard Hambyn, the only person to write a book on Howard's naming of clouds), “...he proposed that every cloud belonged to one of three principal families, to which he had given the Latin names: cirrus (meaning “fiber” or “hair”), cumulus (“heap” or “pile”), and stratus (“layer” or “sheet”). In recognition of the essential instability of clouds, Howard also introduced a sequence of intermediate and compound modifications, such as cirrostratus and stratocumulus, in order to accommodate the regular transitions occurring between the cloud types...”

I've written about Howard elsewhere on this blog, and he comes back to me today for his odd place in the realm of highly-visual-works-published-without-illustration, or at least the first German language treatment of his work appears so, without benefit of a single image, as with the first of the three iterations of this paper in 1803 in the Philosophical Magazine. (It was in the second paper of 1803 that three images of clouds first appeared.) The paper appeared very quickly in Germany, published as "Ueber die Modification der Wolken" in 23pp in the November 1805 issue (volume 21) of the Annalen der Physik, though without any illustration. (Howard's "Versuch einer Naturgeschichte und Physik der Wolken" is published in the Annalen in 1815 also without an image, as do three of his other papers; the lone exception is one engraving illustrating his paper on waterspouts in volume 57.)  I wonder why the article is unembellished--it is almost in a sense a defeat of the classifying idea, not to have some sort of visual reference for the new taxonomy. Perhaps it was a rush to publish, though if that were the case a return to the paper with engravings in a later issue would have been a good idea. In any event, it was a work that demanded pictures, and even though Howard was an accomplished cloud artist, there was little of that lovely work seen until the "third edition" of his essay appeared in 1832. Aside from the historic difficulty of rendering clouds in art, I do not know why it was the case that the earliest works on clouds passed by largely unillustrated,

No doubt there is room for a work on papers written on highly-visual ideas that should've been illustrated but weren't--that's partially how I cam to write this post to begin with, being thwarted by a very early call by Heinrich Brandes in the Annalen der Physik  (1816, noted by Gerald R. North in the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, p. 290) for a system of making weather maps, but published without an example. And in pursuing that I came upon Heinrich Wilhem Dove's paper "Ueber Barometriche Minima" in the Annalen  for 1828 on barometric pressure and the wind (where the wind seems to do a 360 turn generated by falling  pressure), the cartographic elements of which were said to be illustrated on a folding engraved plate and though the symbols are there in a pre-non-representational-art sorta way, the map part wasn't....I mean, there's just no "amp" to the map, except for a scant reference to a city, and that's it. Anyway, it is a curious category that I'd rather read about than research. 

Here's the unusual Dove illustration:

Images or no, the work by Howard was immortalized by Goethe, who admired and respected the man, painting clouds in poetry in 1817:

"To find yourself in the infinite,

You must distinguish and then combine;
Therefore my winged song thanks
The man who distinguished cloud from cloud."

...and then proceeded to describe the main four (of the seven) main cloud types described by Howard:

"STRATUS

When o’er the silent bosom of the sea
The cold mist hangs like a stretch’d canopy;
And the moon, mingling there her shadowy beams,
A spirit, fashioning other spirits seems;
We feel, in moments pure and bright as this,
The joy of innocence, the thrill of bliss.
Then towering up in the darkening mountain’s side,
And spreading as it rolls its curtains wide,
It mantles round the mid-way height, and there
It sinks in water-drops, or soars in air.

CUMULUS

Still soaring, as if some celestial call
Impell’d it to yon heaven’s sublimest hall;
High as the clouds, in pomp and power arrayed,
Enshrined in strength, in majesty displayed;
All the soul’s secret thoughts it seems to move,
Beneath it trembles, while it frowns above.

CIRRUS

And higher, higher yet the vapors roll:
Triumph is the noblest impulse of the soul!
Then like a lamb whose silvery robes are shed,
The fleecy piles dissolved in dew drops spread;
Or gently waft to the realms of rest,
Find a sweet welcome in the Father’s breast.

NIMBUS

Now downwards by the world’s attraction driven,
That tends to earth, which had upris’n to heaven;
Threatening in the mad thunder-cloud, as when
Fierce legions clash, and vanish from the plain;
Sad destiny of the troubled world! but see,
The mist is now dispersing gloriously:
And language fails us in its vain endeavour —
The spirit mounts above, and lives forever."

(Full text here for the illustrated third edition of 1865.  And, yes, this post is not illustrated.)

Notes:

1.  "Askesian", meaning “philosophical exercise”, was “...a practically oriented and largely non-conformist group dedicated to natural and experimental philosophy”.  http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/

2.  According to the OED, “meteorology” goes back quite a way as a word, popping up in 1563; “meteoroloician” appears in 1580, and “meteorologist” in 1683.)

3.  “The location of many of the sketches gives us an initial hint of their Romanticism. For many years Howard travelled between London and the Lake District in order to capture the full range of what he termed ‘cloud modifications’, training himself in the notoriously difficult art of depicting clouds, of fixing them as they changed  “

Howard begins his 1803 paper so:

“If the necessary pursuit If clouds were the mere result of the condensation of var pour in the masses of atmosphere which they occupy if their variations were produced by the movements of the atmosphere alone then indeed might the study of them be deemed an useless pursuit of shadows an attempt to describe forms which being the sport of winds must be ever varying and therefore not to be defined. But however the erroneous admission of this opinion may have operated to prevent attention to them the case is not so with clouds. They are subject to certain distinct modifications produced by the general causes which effect all the variations of the atmosphere they are commonly as good visible indications of the operation of these causes as is the countenance of the state of a person's mind or body...”