JF Ptak Science Books

An Episode in the History of Massiveness: a Double-Bridge and Canal Across the Channel, 1925-1936

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Jules Jaeger proposed this mammoth project for bridging the English Channel: a double-jetting/bridge structure with a 1000'-wide channel between the two. Claire Price wrote a story on the idea for the New York Times on December 6, 1925, and described the structure running straight as an arrow from Calais to an eventual terminus in London, and cost $400,000,000 (or between $4-10 billion in 2018 according to the BLS CPI computer). The two jetties would rise from the channel bottom and be wide enough to each hold a double set of railroad tracks and an upper roadway for cars and freight. Price states that the colossus would be able to handle all manner of traffic in the future, even though the motor causeway is two lanes wide, and that it would be safe during wartime as the jetties would protect against torpedoes for the inner canal, though there is no mention of aircraft or other sorts of attack. 

There's a lot that I do not understand about the construction, not the least of which would be building a jetty 30' wide and 150' high/deep that was 30 miles long, times two. 

And by a stroke of serendipity, I located (stumbled upon) an illustration of Jaeger's channel bridge in a 1936 issue of Popular Mechanics (page 500). And again poor Mr. Jaeger goes unidentified (as a "Swiss engineer", only).  Eleven years later the channel bridge is still alive, in some way, and with a more detailed illustration:

 

And a detail cross section showing roadway and train tracks:

A View of the "Zones of Animal Life" (1889)

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Here's is an interesting bit of data display, showing the distribution of animal life in torrid, temperate, and frigid zones. It is relatively small, 4x4" or so, and is found in James Orton's  Comparative zoology, structural and systematic, published in New York by Harper and Brothers in 1889, (pg 389). 

 

 

The Department of Unexpected Questions: Is the Sun One Sided? (1878)

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I found--or bumped into--the following short note in Nature (September 5, 1878) .  At first glance it has a flat-earthy/Nazis-on-the-dark-side-of-the-Moon quality to it, or at least to me it did. It is a very unexpected question, though it isn't quite what it seems at the outset before you try to think about what part of one-sidedness the author, Balfour Stewart, is addressing. Read the note, and then the title will make sense.  

"Balfour Stewart, (born Nov. 1, 1828, Edinburgh—died Dec. 19, 1887, Drogheda, Ire.), Scottish meteorologist and geophysicist noted for his studies of terrestrial magnetism and radiant heat. Stewart pursued a mercantile career for 10 years before becoming an assistant at Kew Observatory and later an assistant to James Forbes at Edinburgh University, where Stewart conducted his research on radiant heat. In 1859 he became director of Kew Observatory, and in 1870 he became professor of natural philosophy at Owens College, Manchester. In his work on radiant heat, Stewart was the first to discover that bodies radiate and absorb energy of the same wavelength; his work in this field was soon surpassed, however, by that of the German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. In his studies of terrestrial magnetism, Stewart discovered that daily variation in the magnetic field could be explained by air currents in the upper atmosphere, which act as conductors and generate electrical currents as they pass through the Earth’s magnetic field."--Encyclopedia Britannica

Note on the First Microscopical Images of Captured-and-Reproducible Sound? (1878)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2743

Only months into the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison (at Menlo Park in December of 1877 and patented in January 1878) Alexander J. Ellis reviewed a version of it constructed in London by Mr. Stroh, and found it, well, wanting.  Ellis (1814-1890) was a product of Eton, Cambridge, Trinity, and was a gifted mathematician, philologist, and a groundbreaking ethnomusicologist, and did see some limited utility of the machine to restricted areas of his research. In the short note he wrote for Nature in their April 18, 1878 issue¹, he mostly found that the phonograph was generally flawed in its reproductive capacity, and did not venture far from this interpretation so far as the possible applications of the machine was concerned, which seems iconically short-sighted from my perch here in the future. Even though Ellis recognized that "the effects produced are sometimes startling (as in cries, coughs, laughter, music), the philosophy of the process (making a permanent impression of a very complex compound vibration, and using it as a mould to reproduce that vibration is exceedingly attractive, but at present the instrument--at least the one that I saw..." he concludes that the status of the invention "...has not risen beyond a lecture illustration or a philosophical toy".  

Five weeks after this article and about four months following the patenting a visually-arresting article appeared in Nature² which contains what I am assuming to be the first microscopic images of recorded and reproducible sound. I know that is a pretty deep qualification, but I think that's its accurate. The article appeared as "Examination of the Phonograph Record under the Microscope" by Persifor Frazer³, who investigated what the impression of the stylus looked like as known sounds are recorded on tin foil. And so this remarkable image, showing what vowel and some dipthongs "look like".  

There were a number of early attempts to study what sounds look like by Lissajous and Konig, though these instruments did not produce reproducible sound but the  experimenters were able to produce characteristic traces of sounds which were of high value to folks like von Helmholtz. The premier pioneer in this area must be Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville  (1817 –1879), a Parisian printer and bookseller [and also described in other places as a typesetter, stenographer, and “tinkerer”], who was the inventor of the earliest known sound recording device (patented 25 March 1857) known as the “phonautograph”. He was a pre-Edison Edison and was a major influence on the man, though Edison was the man who produced playback from his recordings, and Scott did not. 

• "Scott called this process “phonauto­graphy”—the self-writing of sound. Of course he didn’t expect perfectly formed letters of the alphabet to emerge from the stylus. But he did believe the calligraphy inscribed in the soot—”the words that wrote themselves”—embodied a form of “natural stenography” that would some­day be read as easily as a sten­ographer deciphered his own jottings."--https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/historyculture/origins-of-sound-recording-edouard-leon-scott-de-martinville.htm
• “Sound had been invisible and transient since the beginning of time. Scott’s phonautograph recorded it and made it both visible and perm­anent. It was a technological breakthrough, ahead of its time. He did not intend for his phon­autograms to be played back; that concept was another 20 years away. “-https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/historyculture/origins-of-sound-recording-edouard-leon-scott-de-martinville.htm

This instrument was not as I said designed to play back the recording; rather it was intended that the sound's images and not the auditory experience would be studied. Scott achieved fame, recently, when archephonists were able to math the hell out of the recorded record and cranked an image to sound result—and thus, the earliest recording, Scott de Martinville  (or someone) singing a bit of “Clair de la lune”, made on 9 April 1860, which was presented for the first time in 2008.

I saw a reference and then promptly lost it stating that the first appearance in a journal of Scott's work occurs in 1857—except that in a later paper (1861) Scott references this event and describes giving the Academie a “paquet cachete”, a "sealed document", which I think means that it wasn't read to the assembly or published and was private. This turns out to be the case, the 1857 document being a manuscript, and presented at the excellent First Sounds website, here: http://firstsounds.org/publications/facsimiles/FirstSounds_Facsimile_01.pdf   It does seems though that the first and second published descriptions of the machine occur in 1858 and 1859, with Jules Lissajous’ "Report to the Society" (1858) and in Scott's own paper in Cosmos,  "Phonautographe et fixation graphique de la voix" (1859).

As luck would have it I own a copy of Scott's third paper on his instrument, which appeared in the Comptes Rendus in 1861 (15 July 1861, vol 53 #3, pp 77-128), which seems in its few pages to contain a good description of the device, which would render, as Scott said, “the imprudent idea of photographing the word.”

 Notes:

1)  "The Phonograph", being an article in the April 18, 1878 issue of Nature, volume 17, No 442, pp 485-6 in the weekly issue of pp 481-500. 

2)  Abstract of a paper presented at the Franklin Institute April 17, 1878, by Persifor Frazer, "Examination of the Phonograph record under the Microscope", in Nature, May 23, 1878, p. 102. In this same issue is an excellent paper by Francis Galton, "Composite Photographs..."

3)  Persifor Frazer was of the Philadelphia Frazers, of long and interesting lineage. A Gettysburg vet, he was in professional life mainly a geologist; he did become expert in handwriting and the detection of forgeries using photographic means. 

4) Scott, M. E.-L. "Inscription automatique des sons de l'air au moyen d'une oreille artificielle",  which is translated along the lines of  "Automatic Registration of Sound by an Artificial Ear". Evidently the idea came to Scott while working/reading a textbook and having an aha! moment while reading about the human ear.  Comptes Rendus, pp 108-110, volume 53, 1861. 

"Hand it Over to the Machine" (1878)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2742

WIlliam Spottiswoode (1825-1883),  an English mathematician and physicist, president of the Royal Society from 1878 to 1883, and of the British (Science) Association in 1878 as well, wrote a very appreciable piece on the state of Science in Nature in 1878.  At 15 pages this was a one-percenter for Nature so far as length goes--the pagination sounds short, except that the text was printed in about 8-pt, 90 columns per page, double columns, so the article was no doubt 15k+ words. There were numerous nuggets in this review and state of affairs of the sciences and technology, including sections on mathematics, literature and art, physics instrumentation, manifold space, imaginaries,  and so on, not the least of which was 1500 words on Non-Euclidean Geometry.

What struck me most in all of this was the half-column entry for “Mechanical Methods” (on page 413), which turns out to be “mechanical appliances”, or calculating machines/engines.  It starts with an unusual assertion:

“Mr Babbage, when speaking of the difficulty of insuring accuracy in the long numerical calculations of theoretical astronomy, remarked that that “most accurate science” had become “inaccurate and uncertain in some of its results”.

Spottiswoode continues with an explanation and a dig:

“It is doubtless, some such consideration as this, coupled with his dislike of employing skilled labour when unskilled labour would suffice, which led him to his invention o the calculating machine”.

The author then makes another—again, to my experience—unusual observation, referring to the replacement of human thinking capacity by a machine:

“The idea of substituting mechanized for intellectual power has not lain dormant...”

It is a very short comment, but I think makes a strong if understated point.

The author then moves onto the “recent” machine of James Thomson (“by its aid it seems an unskilled laborer may, in a given time, perform the work of ten skilled arithmeticians...reduced to the simple process of turning a handle"), before finishing with a flourish, though it is easy to read through. In telling the story of Michael Faraday, who after muscling through some concept and determining that the next step would be to hammer it all out mathematically, would “irreverently “ say “hand it over to the calculators”, which at that point was a team of human calculators, arithmeticians, and perhaps more famously known now as "computers".

And the finish:

“But truth is stranger than fiction; and if he had lived until our day, he might with perfect propriety have said, 'Hand it over to the machine' ”.

It is a small statement with a lot of possibility. Even though this comes seven years after Babbage gave up the ghost in Marleybone, it still seems remarkably early to be talking about this sort of major impact in the conduct of the sciences, lending part of the process over to machines. The Industrial Revolution is well into it second century by this point, and human effort in all manner of manufacturing has been replaced by machines—except here the active part of the human experience in the creation of ideas is the thing that is becoming “machinized”.

This brought to mind an earlier piece in the same journal by James Clerk Maxwell, who also wrote an assessment of recent developments in science². 

What I find to be most interesting here is Maxwell pulling back the reins and directing the idea of clear scientific discourse by means of analogy. He does speak of "calculating" and "calculating machine", which is referring to human calculators and not mechanical ones--the issue being that "spending a season" doing this stubborn and consuming work could turn the person occupied with in into a "machine". He writes: 

"What the man of science, whether he be a mathematician or a physical inquirer, aims to do, to acquire and develop clear ideas of the things he deals with. For this purpose he is willing to enter on long calculations, and to be for a season a calculating machine., if he can only at last make his ideas clearer."

"But if he finds that clear ideas are not obtained by the means of processes,  the steps of which he is sure to forget before he has reached the conclusion, it is much better that he should turn to another method, and try to understand the subject by well chosen illustrations derived from subjects with which he is more familiar."

"We all know how much more popular the illustrative method of exposition is found, than that in which bare processes of reasoning and calculation form the principal subject of discourse..."

 Notes:

1. SPOTTISWOODE, William. “British Association”, address on the state of the British Association by the president, in Nature, vol 18, no. 459, occupying most of the weekly issue, pp 403-425 in the issue of pp 401-428.
2.  MAXWELL,  James Clerk.  Mathematical and Physical Sciences--address to Section A of the British Association.  London:  1870.  Nature, vol 2, Sept 22, 1870.   Maxwell addresses the British Science Association meeting in a long (for Nature) entry of about 4,000 words, over 4 pages. 

What struck me most in all of this was the half-column entry for “Mechanical Methods” (on page 413), which turns out to be “mechanical appliances”, or calculating machines/engines.  It starts with an unusual assertion:

“Mr Babbage, when speaking of the difficulty of insuring accuracy in the long numerical calculations of theoretical astronomy, remarked that that “most accurate science” had become “inaccurate and uncertain in some of its results”.

Spottiswoode continues with an explanation and a dig:

“It is doubtless, some such consideration as this, coupled with his dislike of employing skilled labour when unskilled labour would suffice, which led him to his invention o the calculating machine”.

The author then makes another—again, to my experience—unusual observation, referring to the replacement of human thinking capacity by a machine:

“The idea of substituting mechanized for intellectual power has not lain dormant...”

It is a very short comment, but I think makes a strong if understated point.

The author then moves onto the “recent” machine of James Thomson (“by its aid it seems an unskilled laborer may, in a given time, perform the work of ten skilled arithmeticians...reduced to the simple process of turning a handle"), before finishing with a flourish, though it is easy to read through. In telling the story of Michael Faraday, who after muscling through some concept and determining that the next step would be to hammer it all out mathematically, would “irreverently “ say “hand it over to the calculators”, which at that point was a team of human calculators, arithmeticians, and perhaps more famously known now as "computers".

And the finish:

“But truth is stranger than fiction; and if he had lived until our day, he might with perfect propriety have said, 'Hand it over to the machine' ”.

It is a small statement with a lot of possibility. Even though this comes seven years after Babbage gave up the ghost in Marleybone, it still seems remarkably early to be talking about this sort of major impact in the conduct of the sciences, lending part of the process over to machines. The Industrial Revolution is well into it second century by this point, and human effort in all manner of manufacturing has been replaced by machines—except here the active part of the human experience in the creation of ideas is the thing that is becoming “machinized”.

Pre-History of the A-Bomb: Arming Nukes with Your Teeth, 1914.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2741

“Atomic Bomb” appeared in print for the first time thirty years before there was one. It appeared in H.G. Wells' The World Set Free, written in 1913 and published in 1914, evidently before the appearance of the guns of August later in that year. The “set free” part of the world in Wells' hands doesn't come without an atomic struggle, though, much of the novel being a stage-up for the last bit in which people realize that atomic-bombing everything everywhere is not the way to go.

There are other atomic-conjoined terms in this book besides “bomb”, and they are somewhat telling of the period. Wells does make a good strike with “atomic bomb”, “atomic ammunition”, and “atomic power”, and then goes on to describe the other bits that could benefit from this atomicity, including “atomic aeroplanes”, “atomic hay lorries”, “atomic traction engines”, “atomic riveters” (riveting at twice the pace of a human), and “atomic smelters”. So there are some weak spots here and there in his 57 mentions of “atomic-something”, and that's okay—he did some pretty good sightseeing into the future with the bomb.

And he was definitely the first to use “atomic bomb”, according to many sources and not the least of which is the OED (which also provides another interesting example of the word in use, quoting the Yale Review in 1917 “When you can drop just one atomic bomb and wipe out Paris or Berlin, war will have become monstrous and impossible”.) “Atomic-bombed”, “atomic bombing”, and “Atomic bomber” do not make their appearance in the English language until after August 6 in 1945.

The first view of the atomic bomb in Wells finds that there not one but three of them, all contained in a "coffin-shaped box", and even with a 2' diameter were small enough to be stored under a person's legs. The “essential element” in its construction was a substance named “Carolinum¹”, which thus far had been “tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead”.

An Alphabet of -Ocracies

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2740

The other day former CIA director John Brennan (2013-2017) dug up the word kakistocracy from its dirt nap to describe the Trump government. I had never heard of the word before, and so went to the Oxford English Dictionary to look it up. While there, I wondered how many other “-ocracies” and “-cracies” there were that have fallen completely off the RADAR, and it seems there are a lot—just about enough for a full alphabet, with dozens of "extras". (See https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/07/18/words-ending-with-cracy/ for a 60-word list, a longer list with shorter descriptions.)  

Adhocracy.   “A flexible and informal style of organization and management, characterized by a lack of bureaucracy. Also (depreciative): bureaucracy characterized by inconsistency and lack of planning.” 1970.   A. Toffler Future Shock vii. 113   We are..witnessing the arrival of a new organizational system that will increasingly challenge, and ultimately supplant bureaucracy. This is the organization of the future. I call it ‘Ad-hocracy’.

Androcacy.  “The rule or paramount influence of money.” 1868   Pall Mall Gaz. 23 May 11.   The disease of argentocracy."

Angelocracy. "A government by angels. 1685   J. Scott Christian Life (1700) II. ii. vii. 320.   Those angelocracies or angelical governments of countries and nations."

Barbarocracy.  "Government or rule by barbarians, as that of Italy by the German emperors. 1866.   C. C. Felton Greece, Anc. & Mod. II. xi. 486   Better fitted to live under a constitution than under a barbarocracy."

Bestiocracy.   "The rule of beasts. 1863   Times 21 Nov. 8/5.   The English farmers, being..members of a vile bestiocracy, living among the beasts of the field, and even employing men to serve the beasts."

Chrysocracy/ chryso-ariˈstocracy.  "An aristocracy of wealth. [Is there an aristocracy of poverty? I guess so...i.e. Tramp Kings, that sort/] 1885.  E. C. Stedman in Cent. Mag. 29 511.   Even our ‘chryso-aristocracy’ he thinks is bettered by the process."

Demonocracy.   "Government or rule by demons; a ruling body of demons. Now chiefly in extended use (with punning contrast with democracy) referring to cruel or wicked political regimes . 1755, J. Maud Doctr. Endless Torments i. v. 83.   The House of Cain..may..not improperly be said to have put itself under a Demonocracy, where the implacable Adversary to God and Man, was the limited Tyrant."

Dickensian Details in a Pamphlet on Randall Island's Pauper Children, 1876

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Here are a few things I learned from a ten-minute graze through a pamphlet¹ describing the conditions and circumstances of the almshouses facilities on Randall's Island (NYC) in 1876. Randall's Island was pretty far removed from the great bustle of Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1876, having plenty of people to keep and incarcerate at a distance somewhat safely removed from polite society as well as the great unwashed. Today the island is mostly a collection of sports facilities, about an equidistant mile from Riker's Island and the Guggenheim, as the crow flies.) 

In any event, the bits and pieces that gave some insight into what was going on there are interesting:

• Most of the children sent to this place (a collection of at least 12 buildings) were done so "by choice" by their parents, and most of those parents promised to pay for the fees to keep the child/children. Evidently fewer than 50% actually wound up paying. Most of the parents resorting to this were near or in a state of pauperism, and could not afford to keep their child, 
• There were 91 girls, aged 8-14, housed in the “Large Girls' Department” ; they were tended by one paid assistant and up to eight women from the alms-house and work house.
• "Large Boys' Department": no mention of number, but drill master lives with them, plus 3 boys designated as monitors, and six females from the work house.
• "Small Boys' Department": 136 children, tended by 5-6 women, one of whom received wages with five others being paupers or criminals sent from Blackwell's Island. (Blackwell's--now known as Roosevelt Island--was a skinny island about a mile south of Randall's in the East River.  It served to host the first Lunatic Asylum for NYC and was also the country's first mental asylum and also housed prisons, from which I assume the "Blackwell's" helpers came.) 
• "Infants' Department": 72 children aged 2.5-5, tended by 6 females, 5 from Blackwell's.
• The children on reception were dressed in blue gingham, white linen aprons and slept on straw beds and pillows, with food cooked by steam in six large cauldrons, mostly by inmates from Blackwell's. I saw twice that children were released from this facility in the clothing in which they arrived, though there was no mention of what happened if that clothing was outgrown, as 50% of the children stayed here for about two years. 
• Nursery Hospital held 769 between 2 and 16, most between 5-10
• There were 1115 children on Randall's, the near-majority placed there by their parents who promised to pay for care (half did), mostly Irish or “unascertained” ancestry;
• Occupations of fathers “Unascertained”, mechanics, laborers, and 1 professional
• Most had other family members in the same institution or Blackwells
• Female (employed) helpers were mostly 30—40, widowed, and overwhelmingly Irish.

There's a lot more--actually a whole lot more considering the pamphlet's brevity, including a description of schools and trade houses that were supposed to help prepare the kids for life in NYC once they reached the age of sixteen. Overall from my quick reading I was left a little hollow and tired, thinking about all of those kids, crammed together, many of them with continuing illnesses, eating steamed-everything, performing work tasks in stiff gingham, sleeping on straw, and attended by not many people at all, and most of those were convicts or fellow almshouses/poorhouse residents. 

Notes:

William P. Letchworth. Extract from the Ninth Annual Report of the State Board of Charities of New York, relating to PAUPER CHILDREN, New York County. Albany, Weeds, Parsons, and Company, 1876. 9x6”, 25pp. Original wrappers. Nice copy. Provenance: Library of Congress, with their surplus/duplicate rubber stamp on front and rear wrapper. Old vertical fold through-and-through. Includes a folding plan: “Diagram of Nursery and Nursery Hospital Buildings belonging to the Children's department of the Almshouse of New York on Randall's Island.”

"On the 31st January, 1942, the War will End", or not. An Astrologer Looks into the Future of WWII and Gets Confused.

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The great Woo-woo (a blanket term used by James Randi to describe all manner of fake and fraud) of astrologers picking moist bits out of an imagined future during WWII proved to be of value for making an income for its users. One such person was P.J. Harwood, an astrologer who wrote two of the pamphlets I uncovered yesterday. He had shapely visions of the future metamorphised via the light of stars (and galaxies) that traveled for millions and billions of years, evidently their purpose in such vast time and impossibly enormous reaches of space being to cue in people on this planet about some influence their position in eternity has on future human events. The only predictive success these pamphlets by Harwood had was to ensure some sort of income and attention for himself. 

I would not have stopped to say anything about these pamphlets (printed in 1941 and 1944) at all had I not opened one of them to a 32-pt announcement:                 

The funny thing is that this statement occurs in the third edition of the 1941 pamphlet. The way to move forward in publishing his views of the future was to ignore all of the misses and publish hios astrological results under a new title, which he did with his astrological prophesies book for 1944-1947, printed several times in 1944.  Britain was to invade Europe and speed towards Germany in May 1941, leading Hitler to eventually sign a peace treaty in 1944. The U.S. would suffer an enormous defeat on July 6, 1944, but recover enough to defeat Japan sometime in 1947, and so on.  This was one way for one man to make a living during WWII. 

An Early Indictment of the Japanese Invasion of China, 1931

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Here's another bit of graphic design, a very aggressive cover from 1932 for Krieg in China! by Ernst Schneller¹.   Schneller--a long-time KPD member--wrote this short work as an expose on the "war" and in support of the Chinese, published it seems just months after the Japanese invasion and conquest of Manchuria and another few months after the battle known as the January 28 Incident, all of which was foundational for the war that would officially be declared in 1937 (and last until the end of WWII). 

Schneller was himself a persecuted communist intellectual who was arrested became among the first to be imprisoned in the Nazi KZ system in 1933, and who would stay in the system until he was executed at Sachsenhausen in 1944. 

It is interesting to note that in one chapter heading the pamphlet refers to the war as a new threat to the world (“eine neue welt droht”).

Notes

1. Berlin : Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, [1932] 9x6”, 15pp. A little confusing, though it seems that there are only three copies of this book located in WorldCat/OCLC. Provenance, Hoover Institution, and then in 1933 to the Library of Congress.

The Dictatorship of Hunger (1931)

From what I can tell this pamphlet--Hungerdiktatur im Brüning-Deutschland zur IV. Notverordnung. Zk. Der KPD. 1931-- is an indictment of the responses of German Chancellor Heinrich AME Bruning to the explosive Depression in Germany beginning in 1930. Bruning became Chancellor right at the outset of the Depression in 1930 and his options were already very limited, economically speaking, without the failure of the world economy adding to an already deeply compromised situation. Nevertheless, his policies are seen in different perspectives, and he was out of office by 1932 and fled Hitlerism and Germany altogether in 1934. (Bruning was two chancellors removed from Adolf Hitler taking the position in 1933.) In any event the pamphlet here leaves no doubt about the impossibility of the social situation in Germany in 1931 and places a long legion of the Hungry at the feet of Bruning's Germany.

The cover design is very striking, and unattributed.

How to Fly a Farman Biplane (1910)

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I couldn't resist sharing this because, well, I don't often see a one-sheet explanation on how to fly a plane.  This is from the Illustrated London News, May 7, 1910, and concerns the Farman biplane:  

Great Calculators: Mental and Metal and back to Mental

JF Ptak Science Books     Expanding Post 2739

Two months ago I wrote on a paper that I found in a mid-century engineering journal (Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers with Abstracts of the Discussions) on the fantastic mental arithmetician George Parker. When I went to retrieve the volume to look for a different paper (on Fresnel lenses for lighthouses) I  flipped the pages to then end of the book to read through the index, and my thumb stopped on a page with a running header, "Mechanical Notations". And lo and behold, the very familiar title was indeed a paper on a report to the Institution on Charles Babbage (1791-1871) and his "mechanical notation", given by his son Henry P. Babbage (1824-1918).

Well.  Babbage over the years proposed several different difference and analytical engines which indeed could be considered the first stored program Turing-complete computers. Never quite being able to get to the end of one project, and no doubt discovering along his various ways even better and more substantial designs (as well as int he pursuit of future money to build not "version 1.0" or "1.1" but "3.0"), Babbage tried within the limits of available technology to produce his heroic beast. His "mechanical notation" appears in full force in his diagrams for the design of his analytical engine, and it is there that we see his self-derived shorthand and symbols that produced and still-produce evident budgets of unknowns. The thing is, with these mechanical notations, is that they were part of a user manual, and the user manual was actually left unwritten and chiefly unexplained. And that is a problem. 

In any event this paper by Henry Provost Babbage makes some attempt in outlining the notation, though for me it is done without success. This is further complicated by almost none of the notation presented in illustration. There were other and earlier illustrated papers (including some by Babbage himself) that stretch back at least to 1821--but this explanation of the notations leaves me a little on the outside. 

And so we moved from the mental calculator George Bidder to the great metallic calculating engines of Charles Babbage, who takes us back to the opening biological/mental part of engineering thought via his manual-less manual, where his instructions and explanations of the interactions of thousands of perfectly manufactured precision gear works is printed but the key to which is left locked in Babbage's head.  

_____

Here's the part of the post that led to the discovery of the Babbage, both of these papers as I said appearing in the same journal volume: 

George Parker Bidder (1806-1878) gave a lecture (without notes) explaining to the audience at the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1856¹ his interior practices and habits in performing absolutely prodigious and complex arithmetical feats entirely in his head. He was among the first tier of performing human calculators (like Zerah Colburn, b. 1804) mental calculations enchanted large audiences from the stages, answering seemingly impossible questions with accuracy and speed. It is in the 1856 paper (which Martin Gardner refers to as "historic²" and "valuable") that he relates some of the practices which clarify his process--for example, one large element was that he would keep one fact in his head at a time, until it was finished, and then move on. Of course for people who did not have anything even remotely resembling this impossible ability, the information is interesting, though I have no idea how useful it may be...unless you were already a savant, that is.  Some things are just not to be known by mere mortals. Like the probably-apocryphal story of someone asking Hans Bethe how Richard Feynman had solved--on his feet--some impossible something, and Bethe responds: "First he thinks very very hard....and then he gets the answer".) Something like that. 

In any event, here's the article, reproduced by Devonshire Perspectives website. My own copy is in a tightly-bound volume from the proceedings, and no doubt I would have broken the spine trying to copy the thing. That said, if anyone wants to buy this volume, it is for sale--this is a book selling site, sorta, after all.  

The full lecture by Bidder:

https://www.devonperspectives.co.uk/georgebidder/OnMentalCalculation.pdf

Notes:

1. Bidder, George Parker. "On Mental Calculation", in Minutes of Proceedings of he Institution of Civil Engineers with Abstracts of the Discussions, volume XV, Session 1855-6, London, published by the Institution,  pp 251-280 in the 534pp volume. 

2.  Gardner, Martin. "Mathematical Games", in Scientific American, 216/4, April 1967, p. 117. 

Also, I found an interesting biographical treatment of Bidder:

• Bidder, George Parker. Mental Arithmetic. A short account of George Bidder, the celebrated mental calculator: with a variety of the most difficult questions, proposed to him at the principal towns in the kingdom, and his surprising rapid answers, etc. by George Parker BIDDER Rapid Calculator and Engineer., 1821

It seems as though there was a separate edition of this 1856 lecture tens years later, published by Clowes:

• Bidder, George Parker, and Institution of Civil Engineers (Great Britain). On Mental Calculation. Edited by Charles Manby. London: Printed by W. Clowes, 1866.

And another printing somewhat later:

• Bidder, George Parker. On Mental Calculation. London: Printed by W. Clowes, 1886.