JF Ptak Science Books

On Not Reporting on the Russian Winter, 1941.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2748

Neige Russe is a straightforward-looking and scarce¹ little pamphlet, though the cover photo is really quite provocative.  No publisher, year, or place of publication is mentioned, though it is almost certainly 1942²--and as a piece of propaganda it is rather well-made, printed on a solid, heavier stock with a bit of a sheen to it, an unusually better-quality production for what it was. 

The pamphlet is a very interesting collection of German newspaper and radio comments on the state of the winter in Russia and its effects on the German troops in the world's largest military movement, Operation Barbarossa. The attack by the Nazis on 22 June began an enormous and horrible campaign that would last two winters, the initial vast successes of the aggressor checked and then nearly defeated in the first winter just months after the offensive began.  There are dozens of quotes taken from German sources that de-emphasize the effect of the historically impregnable Russian winter on the armies, reported mostly from October-December 1941, and of course the would be no truthful information shared by the Nazi-controlled radio or press on the effect of the winter that was engulfing the German troops--quite the contrary, if you look at some of the samples below. The winter existed, but not for Germany, and it had little effect on the troops.

By the next winter, in January 1943, the Germans would lose entire armies to the cold and to the massive numbers of Soviet troops and tanks and artillery, and the long, slow retreat back to Germany would end in total failure 14 months later. 

Some examples of German news reports on the winter in Russia, 1941:

• “L'hiver n'existe qu'en Meteorology”
• “La guerre sera decidee, en tout etat de cause, avant l'hiver” (the war will end before winter)
• “Rien n'arrete l'avance allemande”
• “Les Allemands n'aiment pas la terre brulee”
• "Indomptee par les rigeurs de l'hiver"
• “Il n'est pas Question de Prendre les Quartiers d'Hiver”
• “Le problemedeliverestexcessivementserieuxpoulestroupesSovietiques”
• “Apres tout, les soldats Allemands ne peuvent pas supporter le froid cokme les Siberiens”
• “La ligne d'hiver sera tenue”

The photos used in the pamphlet are varied of course by the source—the German images devoted to ease and possible victory, the Russian showing defeat and bitterness and deadly cold. 

NOTES:

1. It turns out that there is scarcely a mention of the work online, and only six copies are located in libraries around the world, and according to WorldCat/OCLC, these institutions are prestigious: the work is found only at Yale, Harvard, Haifa, National Library of Poland, Nanterre, and Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience. I had expected more of a presence, given that this pamphlet wasn't made to be so disposable as its brethren, but not many seem to have survived.  
2. The date is given as [1942] in the WorldCat listings.

Dueling Intergalactic Rocket Ports, in Glorious BIG Color! (1938+1939)

 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This was a big gulp of a very colorful possible futureworld in which intergalactic travel has become possible, this image of this model being given an advanced peek prior to the New York World's Fair of 1939.  "Intergalactic" is a big deal, because, well, there are galaxy-sized distances involved--even in Star Trek the Next Generation, the Enterprise never in the run of that series leaves the galaxy under its own power, and so the possibility of travel between the galaxies such that there could be a "rocketport" for it would be a very big deal, indeed.

[Source 1: Popular Mechanics, volume 70, August, 1938]

Perhaps that is what was needed at the New York World's Fair of 1939, given the state of things--the Great Depression, the Munich Appeasement and the hollow "peace in our time", the Austrian Anschluss, the seizure of the Sudetenland, Kristallnacht, the Spanish Civil War, and the continuation of the Japanese assault on China, all could have spelled out the need for some sort of relief even if that was fictional and in the future. Certainly intergalactic travel would qualify for that, as did a number of other pieces of speculative/scifi entertainment that year: Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were alive and well, Superman appears for the first time, and Orson Welles scares the wits out of a certain segment of the population  with the Halloween-night performance of "The War of the Worlds". Perhaps the time was ripe for the rocket port--especially in such vivid color. 

The reason for the "dueling" int he title of this post is the following image that appeared in Views of the New York World's Fair, 1939, published about a year later:

The images are very similar, though the 1939 image is much fuller and a bit more contrasty, with heavier blues and more details in the "spotlight" or whatever that light source was in the center of the image. Also, there are no crowds to speak of in the 1939 image, jsut a few people scattered here and there, and there are also no futurismo boat or train.  I think I like the second one better....

 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This was a big gulp of a very colorful possible futureworld in which intergalactic travel has become possible, this image of this model being given an advanced peek prior to the New York World's Fair of 1939.  "Intergalactic" is a big deal, because, well, there are galaxy-sized distances involved--even in Star Trek the Next Generation, the Enterprise never in the run of that series leaves the galaxy under its own power, and so the possibility of travel between the galaxies such that there could be a "rocketport" for it would be a very big deal, indeed.

[Source 1: Popular Mechanics, volume 70, August, 1938]

Perhaps that is what was needed at the New York World's Fair of 1939, given the state of things--the Great Depression, the Munich Appeasement and the hollow "peace in our time", the Austrian Anschluss, the seizure of the Sudetenland, Kristallnacht, the Spanish Civil War, and the continuation of the Japanese assault on China, all could have spelled out the need for some sort of relief even if that was fictional and in the future. Certainly intergalactic travel would qualify for that, as did a number of other pieces of speculative/scifi entertainment that year: Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were alive and well, Superman appears for the first time, and Orson Welles scares the wits out of a certain segment of the population  with the Halloween-night performance of "The War of the Worlds". Perhaps the time was ripe for the rocket port--especially in such vivid color. 

The reason for the "dueling" int he title of this post is the following image that appeared in Views of the New York World's Fair, 1939, published about a year later:

The images are very similar, though the 1939 image is much fuller and a bit more contrasty, with heavier blues and more details in the "spotlight" or whatever that light source was in the center of the image. Also, there are no crowds to speak of in the 1939 image, jsut a few people scattered here and there, and there are also no futurismo boat or train.  I think I like the second one better....

 

Hospital Experience with Foreigners: Defining “Desirable” and “Undesirable” (1903)

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What Ho! The pamphlet, Figures on Immigration, presents the reader with info necessary for the continuation of “desirable” immigration. Published by the National Liberal Immigration League (150 Nassau St., NYC), the League exclaims immigration in terms danger and blessing. “A stream that is dangerous when unchecked will prove a blessing in the land when well directed”, they say, and then gets right ot the heart of the matter, identifying what is dangerous and what isn't by defining the “desirable” from “undesirable” aliens

To be very simple and clear about it, the League states the following:

Desirables: “Northern and Western Europe”, including “Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, Norway, Nova Scotia, Scotland, South America, Switzerland, Wales”

Undesirables: “Eastern and Souther Europe”, including “Greece, Hungary, Italy, Romania, and Russia, plus Asia and Africa, including China, Egypt, Japan, and Syria”, for example

The purpose of the report was to establish the “desirable” from “undesirable” patients of various NYC hospitals. But the main point in this note is to establish the contemporary ease of marking "acceptabilities" of entire classes of people. This practice was much more visible and plain in 1902; it is still an exercise today, of course, though the signs of it are generally much more subtle. 

Quiet, the Quietists, and Not Finding a Missing "Principia Mathematica" (1687)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2747

Grazing through old scholarly journals is never a completed task—the more you have to bring to the adventure, the more you will take away from it. This is probably a general truth, though it is particularly so with journals that cut a broad path in the communication of ideas, and this is certainly the story with the late-17^th century journal/magazine, Bibliotheque Universelle. It ran from 1672 to 1726, and the intellectually-thirsty editors ran a kind of review/abstract service for their readers—they found (mostly) newly published books in a wide variety of areas, and wrote summaries and statements on them, with background history, and the occasional editorial comment. Some of the articles were on significant works by John Locke and Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, but many and probably most were on obscure topics in nitty theological history and mostly-invisible philosophical issues, or at at least that is how the latter seems to me today. The Bibliotheque brought new ideas to the continent, and brought them in the Lingua Franca, which also happened to be French.

This is the background as I thumbed my way through volume seven, one of several volumes for this year, finding few things that fired any nodule of memory or investigation in my head. 1687 is a big year in the history of science, seeing the publication in July of that year of what may one of them most important books ever published, Isaac Newton's Pricnipa Mathematica.

And then, suddenly, it was there. I knew from a previous experience that an interesting and uncommon review of the Principia by John Locke (of all people) in the next volume (8), which was the third statement on the book outside of Britain. But I hadn't know about this appearance, which would have been published just a couple of months after the Principia appeared.

There were just a few lines announcing the book in the table of contents, but no page reference. I consulted an online version of the journal and did a search on Newton, with no results. That of course made me go through the book—twice--page by page to make sure that the article wasn't there. It wasn't. I imagine that the mention of one of the world's greatest books was, well, a mistake.

The Principia was quiet.

The funny thing was that there was another article on exactly that—quiet. And this was a dangerous quiet, at least for the originator of the theological movement, who would be cast into the flames of the Inquisition and die in prison for the temerity of quietude.

In the next page of the table there was this fine find: “Le Quietiste, ou les Illusions de l'oration de Quietude”, (p 550-554) and “Receuil de diverse pieces concernant le quietisme et les quietistes”(pp 554-559).

These two articles are statements/reviews of two books addressing the Quietism and Quiesiste movement as embodied by its founder, Miguel de Molino (1626-1696). Very long story short, Molino was seen as a threat to the pope and to the Jesuits, preaching a Christianity that seems quite personal and benevolent from where I sit, but at the time was seen as heretical, and for which Molino would be tried by the Holy Offices and condemned to life in prison, and as a matter of fact, Molino died in the (outwardly) beautiful Castel St. Angelo serving out his sentence.

It seems to have a bit forward and backwards for Molino. Charges were brought against him chiefly through the work of pieces like the first presented above, by the Jesuit Paolo Segneri (1624-1697), whose first efforts were unsuccessful in dislodging Molino, with his own work finding its way to the Index. However, by 1685 he was again sent to the Inquisition, and just months before this book was published, he was already tried and imprisoned.

William James (in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902) found Molino to be a “spiritual genius” (p. 130) and his Quietism to be a ”transcendental idealism”, with “a healthy-minded opinion of repentance” (p. 130). He seems to have found nothing threatening in the man, and his imprisonment an “abomination”. The issues were longer and deeper than this, with 250+ points brought up before the Inquisition, including “moral deformity”), but on the whole Quietisme seems as destructive as George Fox's Quakerism, which seems to have shared many spiritual practices with Quietism.

So it seems that the established order in Rome found the message of the Quietists too loud, and the voice of the Principia was to be found in the next volume.

One Word, Three Un-hyphenated (?!) F's in a Row!

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2746

 

I just came upon this fine word, which for a moment challenged my probably under-corrected vision, and saw that it contained three consecutive f consonants! On a Saturday, cranky with a fever and stiff(f) neck, this was a superb BLAST! Or “blast”. Or “b”. Anyway the word is Luftschifffahrft and it occurs in the title of a pamphlet by Wenzel Kotzauer, Die Luftschifffahrt und ihre Zukunft, printed in Vienna in 1895.

The forty-page pamphlet is about the future of air flight and as fixed-winged aircraft rather than airships, noting in particular the 1894 Hiram Maxim “aeroplane¹”. The Maxim machine was prodigious, and was mainly built for testing purposes—it weighed 3 to 4 tons, carried two steam engines that generated 180hp (!) and had pushing props that were 17.5' in diameter, making the thing a beast-and-a-half. It was fixed to a very wide two-track system to keep it from lifting off the ground when the engines were running—or to keep it from careening around out of control. In any event, Maxim's dream machine didn't make it very far and was dismantled after a few years. (He also attempted an unsuccessful return to heavier-than-air flight in 1910.)

But back to the three Fs. “Luftschifffahrt”, which translates basically to “airplane” or perhaps “aeroplane”, and thus the title is about Airplane/ship/aeroplane Travel in the Future. Or thereabouts. It is a technical work, with much on the actual “aeroplane”, which in its first use were the wings, and here there is much discussion on their size and shape.

What most interests me though are the repetitive consonants. They just don't seem to happen in English, naturally, without being hyphenated. (Using the word “un-hyphenated” again I just want to point out its terrific irony!) The word appears with fewer letters as “Schifffahrt”, which is simply "shipping”.

The most obvious hyphenated candidate for me is “cross-section”, which I use often in this blog, though I can't kill the hyphen and pulling the two words together as it makes it look like overstuffed snake-sausage: crosssection. As smaller snake is the person who sees a seer is not a seeer, and Scrabble-challenged words like “zzz” and “brrr^etc” definitely do not count, noooo sir.

Anyway: fff.

Notes:

1.  In general at this time "aeroplane" referred to the wings/airfoils of a plane, not so much as an aircraft itself.  Mostly, it seems. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the first use of the word in this sense occurs in 1866, with a useful explanation of it found two years later:

All of the following come from the Oxford English Dictionary:

“Aeroplane”

1868   3rd Ann. Rep. Aëronaut. Soc. 36   He had turned his attention to the wing and to the sustainer, or what he might call the aëroplane.

1894   O. Chanute Progress in Flying Machines 237   This main aeroplane..is trussed and stiffened in every direction by wire stays.

1905   G. Bacon Balloons 111   What are called ‘aeroplanes’—large flat surfaces, light but rigid inclined at a suitable angle to the horizon.

Aeroplane=aircraft/airplane (as a noun) comes at about the same time:

1868   Eng. Mechanic 24 Apr. 91/2   We have yet to see the ‘aëroplane’ with buoyancy sufficient to sustain 150 lb., or with apparatus sufficiently light and portable to make headway on an ‘air plane’... Supposing an aëroplane to have raised itself, if it reared out of equilibium it and the occupant would come to grief.

1873   D. S. Brown in 8th Ann. Rep. Aëronaut. Soc. 17   I think this [sc. impetus] will be more requisite with respect to the aëroplane than any other vehicle.

1873   Ann. Rep. Aëronaut. Soc. 20   Mr. Bennett introduced an Aëroplane invented by a Frenchman, to be worked by a screw by motive power derived from elastic springs.

Finally, "airplane" as a noun comes into existence, or nearly so, in the early part of this past century:

1906   Sci. Amer. 29 Dec. 487/1   Air-plane is a much better word than aeroplane. It is as good etymologically, and much better when it is spoken.

1907   Westm. Gaz. 19 July 4/2   It is this ease of going against the current, with no motive force in evidence, that is..the despair of the aeronauts with their air-planes.

1917   N.A.C.A. (U.S.) Rep. Nomencl. Aeronaut. 31   Airplane..This term is commonly used in a more restricted sense to refer to airplanes fitted with landing gear suited to operation from the land. If the landing gear is suited to operation from the water, the term ‘Seaplane’ is used.

 

On the History of Kindness to Children (1687)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2745

Another piece of great serendipity fell from the sky, again this week, this time on the idea of the history of childhood--more accurately, it is on the history of kindness extended to children. The idea of looking at childhood in that way lies in the work, for example, of Phillipe Aires (Centuries of Childhood, first French edition 1960) and Lloyd deMause (The History of Childhood, 1974), among others, who maintain that kindness towards children is a modern invention. (This is kind of wildly brief statement of this idea--suffice to say though that the treatment of children through long history has not been necessarily "kind". For example, the word "childhood" appears only twice in the Bible (KJV), and really only once in reference to what childhood might have been rather than a simple statement regarding a period of human life. That occurs in Ecclesiastes 11:10: “Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.” This is in line with an older variety of that book, the Cloverdale Bible, in Ecclesiastes xii. “A   Childehode and youth is but vanite” which again makes the point of childhood being something to get away from rather than a chance to improve the life of the new person. The Oxford English Dictionary takes the word back to Middle English times, but even into the 19th century I can't really point to an applicable use of the word in connection to this discussion.)

The issue came up while listening to a public reading by my wife's (Patti Digh) favorite living author, Richard Powers. He was taking questions after a lovely read from his newest, called The Overstory, when a question came to him regarding human-like senses in animals. Powers responded saying that all was possible, seeing as how people question those human qualities in other human beings. He used the term “Anthropomorphism of Man”, which I found fantastic, as he was correct. For centuries certain people simply weren't regarded on the same human level as other people (those people doing the judging). For example, in the U.S., women, African Americans, the poor, Asians, and so on from a long list, have only recently been elevated to the prospect of “sameness” with those in power in this country. Before this, they were something “lesser”. And it was here that Powers offered “children” as not being children, not even a full human, for most of the history of humans, and so only recently come into their own as full humans.

Then came the serendipity.

I was browsing through one of the 30 volumes or so of an Amsterdam-published 17^th century magazine/journal called Bibliotheque Universelle looking for articles of scientific interest. There's a lot in these little bricks of books, and they do have some occasionally good (and great) scientific efforts in them, the one I was working on, one of several volumes for the Principia year of 1687 (July 5), yielded nothing of any great sci-interest in its 500+ pages. Then, I spotted it, just a simple four lines of 6-point type in the 5”-tall book: “Fenelon, de l'Education de filles...” That's François de Salignac de La Mothe- Fénelon, of Telemachus (son of Ulysses, etc.) fame, and his book was on the education of daughters. It was published the year before, in 1686, and the editors of the Bibliotheque gave it 14 pages or so of review and explanation.

It seems to me from this reading that in this account—really on education of children in general--M. Fenelon was an advanced thinker, a human human-rights person, treating children and their education as individuals, with understanding, and kindness.

Evidently the man speaks to curiosity and rational amusement in the book—that curiosity must precede the rational, and that one must be careful in doing that, because there is a danger of “imitation”--curiosity is the thing that banishes ennui.

At the same time instruction must be realistic, so that once mature and grown that the real world is not a total shock, and that once subjected to the daily routine of “housewifery” there will be no denouement from the dreams of childhood—all of that seems like a pretty sticky wicket. Fenelon did seem to insist on the beginning of education from infancy, but not to overdo the instruction as that would “oppress the facilities”.

Perhaps the most surprising positive thing of them all to me was Fenelon's insistence on being careful with your words with the mature child, and to never be guilty of a falsehood with children, which is pretty good and sane advice.

There's other stuff that doesn't translate any longer into where we are today, but there seems to be a lot of material that is timeless.

 

A History of Big: Massive Aircraft, 1936

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In the history of aircraft, there's big, really big, and then Hughes H-4 ("Spruce Goose") big.  Then there's the ocean-going aircraft below, found on p. 529 in the 1936 volume of Popular Mechanics. The nameless aircraft would be more than 375' long and have a wingspan of 550'.  By comparison, an aircraft called the "Stratolaunch" now under construction and designed by Burt Rutan, would have a wingspan of 385'. The "Spruce Goose" was 319' wide and 216' long; the 747-8 was 249'wide and 242' long; and the Airbus A 380-800 stands 262' wide and 236' long. In short, of planes having flown, this fabulous thing with the 550' wings would be twice their size.  

That said, this giant aircraft was limited not by imagination but by flight of technological fancy. It was supposed to require a crew of 100, fly at only 12k feet at 300mph, and make it across the Atlantic in 11 hours. So, the size was certainly awesome by today's standards; the tech business end of it, not so much. In any event, the image is quite striking: