JF Ptak Science Books

The First Weather Map Printed in the U.S. (1838)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2794

Here's another example of a book that I catalogued for the books-for-sale section of this blog that may be of some interest to general readers: the first weather map printed in the U.S. (1838). 

"I've Got a Bridge to Sell You!" First (?) Notice of the Sale of the Brooklyn Bridge? (1867)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

The butt of an old tag-line for a gullible person convinced of something that could be easily disproved was something along the lines of "...and if you believe THAT I have a bridge to sell you", that bridge being of course the Brooklyn Bridge. Well, the snippet below from an article in The Brooklyn Eagle (January 25, 1867, page 2) in which the agreements were made to start construction of the bridge (commencing in 1869) also included a section about the sale of the bridge from the corporation building it to NYC or Brooklyn or both. Now this is not what the comedy tag referred to of course as this was real, but it is a little amusing to see such a thing in black-and-white.

Also its amusing to see below it a notice on "punishment for injuring the bridge".

Lastly in this short post I include an interesting view of the future, found at the end of an appreciation of John Roebling in a volume of the Journal of the Franklin Institute for 1867.  It is a statement on the plans for building the Brooklyn Bridge--at teh time it was still the "New York and Brooklyn Bridge", and then the "East River Bridge", though "Brooklyn Bridge" was also used, the official designation of that final name coming in 1915. 

 

[Source: Brooklyn Eagle archive at the Brooklyn Public Library, now gloriously online.]

 

[Source: Journal of the Franklin Institute, volume 84, pg 410.]

One of the Earliest Reports of Dogs on the Newly-Invented Telephone (1877-1884)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Okay, so I really don't have any idea of what might be the earliest use of a telephone with a dog--I mean, who does? However I do have some long experience in looking at very early reports on the development of the telephone and the first time I ever came across a reference mentioning dogs and the phone was today (oh sweet joy!) in the Journal of the Franklin Institute (volume 116, June 1884, p 460). This is nothing really but personal bias and judged on my own experience, but I have to say that I may be right in my guess...though I'm not going to set out and research what a better answer might be in pulling the timeline to make it taught.  In any event, it is an enjoyable report, and at this point the dogs probably reacted like most humans did hearing the telephone for the first time.  

A Marching Band Without Instruments, but with an Wireless Master (1922)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I've written here before about the early incursion of technology into the spheres of human creativity and imagination. Now, some of those bits have stretched the idea a little, but when people (or Our Future Robot Overlords) look back  into the dim dust they may be more prepared to accept some of propositions of these posts as pre-history implications of the future domination of something along the lines of AI or universal intelligence. For example, one of the posts dealt with the replacement of live music in theaters with "robot music" , which was simply "canned", or recorded music replacing the live players. (See https://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2016/10/robot-songs-of-love-.html for example.) 

Along these lines came  another example today, this one from 1922 (just a year after the creation of the word "robot" from Karel Capek's R.U.R.): the marching band with no instruments. This was the "Phantom Band" depicted in the pages of Popular Mechanics in March 1922 and shows a band identified so, marching with a radio set playing the music rather than the human performers. (If you look closely you can see the drum major is carrying an antenna, and the sousaphonist is actually carrying a loudspeaker, and somewhere in there are folks carrying the battery set, and so on. There's no clue in this short article why this demonstration was taking place, but it did.  

And another example of "robotic" music (1929):

A Fine Engineering Effort: Constructing the Foundation for a New Building Under the Still-in-Use Building to be Replaced (1922)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Here's a very interesting engineering and building feat: placing the foundations for a new building to replace an older one while the older one was still (1) standing and (2) in use. The recipient of this effort was the McVickers Building in Chicago, a theater that opened in 1857 and came to it slow end in 1922. It looks like the last bit of currency was squeezed out of this old building, performances being given right to the very end while foundations for the new building were being constructed 24 hours a day. Int he world of cross sections this is a good one, and also pretty unusual. Also in the top left corner we see a photo of a caisson under construction--a shot I don't see very often in my searches of old stuff.  

Source: Popular Mechanics, February, 1922. 

Massive Paper Coronary for the Coroner’s Office of NYC, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

If you ever had any interest—known and unknown—in reading about very impressive amounts of corruption and its constituents in the coroner’s office for NYC 104 years ago, here’s your chance to satisfy it. I’ve found a scarce report documenting the extraordinary conditions of that agency and also found a copy of it online, and include a link to the report (below).

You don’t want to be on the other end of this paper—it is scathing, and angry, and well-written and documented. From a quick read of it the office of the coroner of NYC was simply a fantastic mess of incompetent work and very highly competent corruption.

The report starts at the end, with a summary of findings, and then goes downhill from there:

• “The elective coroner in New York City represents a combination of power, obscurity and irresponsibility which has resulted in inefficiency and malfeasance in the administration of the office. With constant temptation and easy opportunity for favoritism and even extortion, with utter lack of supervision and control, and without the slightest preparation and training to create in the coroner's mind a scientific and professional interest in the performance of his duties, the present system could not have been better devised intentionally to render improbable, if not impossible, the honest and efficient performance of the important public function entrusted to his office.

Of the 65 men who have held the office of coroner since consolidation, not one was thoroughly qualified by training or experience for the adequate performance of his duties….”

There’s a ton of bitter accusation of wrongdoing along with the evidence to back it up. 

• Here’s the full text via Hathitrust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015055432580;view=2up;seq=4

Electricity and Telegraphy Before the Electric Telegraph: the (Electric) Shock of Recognition (1825)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Here's an interesting twist on electricity and the telegraph, but not quite what you'd expect. The note, written by "Moderator", appeared in Mechanics' Magazine for 15 June 1825 (volume iv, p 148). Since this is 1825, the telegraph being referred to here is an "atmospheric telegraph", or semaphore, the electric telegraph of Morse being another dozen years away and another 5 or 6 before its practical appearance.

The electricity here was being used in part to alert (where "alert" = "shock") whoever it was that was snoozily sitting at their post to instantly pay attention to whatever it was being signaled to that point in the semaphore chain:

"The electric shock may be so disposed as to ignite gunpowder; but if this is not sufficient to rouse up a drowsy officer on the night-watch, let the first shock pass through his elbows, then he will be quite awake
to attend to the second..."

I can't tell if this is being suggested along a A Modest Proposal sympathy, or not. 

This shock-bit though is preceded by something interesting that I also don't quite understand, though that is starting to sound like the modern electric telegraph:

“…and by a series of gradations in the strength and number of shocks, and the interval between each, every variety of signal may be made quite intelligible, without exposure to the public eye…”

In any event, it is an interesting footnote in the history of communication and those sleeping through it. 

 

 

"The Western Frontier" and How Old That Name Might Be

JF Ptak Science Books  (From the series on "Naming Things")

I'm returning to this post (from ten years and 4300 posts ago) on the question of "where is the West?" because I thought I had stumbled upon a very early mention of the related idea of "the western frontier". The phrase popped up in an article on the telegraph systems of the world (in the Journal of the Franklin Institute for 1852) and in the section on the U.S. there is a mention of telegraphs "now extending from the verge of civilization on the western frontier (east of the Rocky Mountains) to the northeast extremity of the United States". It struck me that--I thought--I really didn't recall seeing "western frontier" (without a capitalized "W") all that much in the mid-19th century, let alone discussing it in terms of Colorado. 

To check out the scarcity of this phrase I checked out the Frederick Jackson Turner piece that started this whole idea of the study of the U.S. frontiers and scanned for the elements, finding "frontier" mentioned 168 times, "west" 107 times, "western" 42 times, but with only four appearances of "western frontier", and that usually in reference to the slavery issue. The OED was no help on this, unfortunately, and could not establish "western frontier" in the long entry on "frontier", which has a very old and long usage in English. From there I went over to WorldCat, and checked out the appearance of "western frontier" in the titles of books printed 1800-1860, and found in the dozens of millions of book records that it seemed to occur hundreds of times. However, once getting rid of duplication, and works that had "western" and "frontier" in the title but not together, it looked as though there might only be 10 or 20, but a short look at that set showed the usage in the form I was looking for reaching back into at least the 1820's.  So, my 1852 reference was way late, but I think I might be able to say that "western frontier" really doesn't pick up in usage until after Turner's 1893 piece. 

Anyway, here's the rest of that earlier post: 

This wonderful map is from Charles Paullin and John K. Wright Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, Washington, Carnegie Institution, and New York, American Geographical Society, 1932. It is just so very interesting and unusual--I'm not so sure that I've seen another map quite like this, illustrating travel time and difficulty..  One major stand-alone feature here for me is the distance from New York City to my own area of the U.S., the southern Appalachian region of western North Carolina: it took six days to get to Savannah from NYC and two weeks (!) to get up here in the mountains, which looks to be about the same amount of time it took to get to the Chicago area.  Of course once you got to Asheville in 1830 you were, well, probably looking to get somewhere else. I'd take it that the turkey population vastly outnumbered the people.  Maybe the horses did, too.  Getting back on track here though the West in the U.S. at the time began just on the other side of the state of Tennessee, and it wasn't but a couple (?) of censuses before this that the West was right about at the Cumberland Gap/Ohio River basin region.

Perhaps this leads us to a more interesting if badly-asked question:  where does the American West begin? 

This is an awfully tricky question, best left to the answer that pops into your mind the instant you hear the question, before the problems of what the sentence entails creep in.

Locating where the West begins is a curious, personal adventure--is it on the other side of the Mississippi, or does it really start in Texas, and once in Texas does it start in Austin or the sleepy Brazos? Does it really begin where the sign says it did, at Meacham Field in Fort Worth?

It depends on the era, too, as we just said above; in the 18th century the American West was really out there with the makers of the martyr Bibles in Ephrata, which means that the rest of the  place was really very big.  And of course you can go all the way back to the beginning of European colonization here, all of North America was the West, at least to the people who were boarding the ships thousands of miles away across the Atlantic. And even once they got here the West was problematic--for the Spanish in the southlands there doesn't really seem to be a "west", only the northlands. In the 16th century the West was just creeping into Pennsylvania (Penn's Forests), and the French and Indian War in the mid 18th century was fought over the control of "the West", the crux of it all heading down to the forks of the Ohio at Pittsburgh.  Even in the late 18th century, the West was still not all that far away, relative to what we think of today, what with Kentucky being the first "Western" state admitted to the Union (in 1792).  It would probably be easiest just to say that the Mississippi River is the dividing line; after all, Lewis and Clark departed (in 1803) on their expedition from St. Louis (as did hundreds of thousands of other people later in the century who were seeking their new life in the West).  Then there's the West of Saul Steinberg. who puts the whole thing on the other side of the Hudson...I'm not so sure if the West didn't start for some people somewhere along 11th Ave.

And where does the West "end"?  Does the West make it all the way to California coast, or does it stop in the desert, east of Sacramento?  Do people think of Oregon and Washington as the West; certainly they're western, but are they The West?   To really complicate things, I guess you could define the middle of the West and look for the boundaries.  But the middle of the West usually seems to me to be flat and red and not terribly high; who's to say that a nice town in Colorado (Salida?) might not be the middle of the West, even if it is 7,000 feet high?   

Its a tricky question and probably most people have a different answer for it.  For that matter, what about the South?  Where does that begin? I'm in a southernish state, but I hardly think of Asheville as being in The South per se. Maybe we're too high; maybe the place over 2000' in elevation that are south of Pennsylvania are just Appalachia, and actually not part of the South.  Scotland Neck over on the other part of my state is definitely the South to me, but perhaps it isn't too much very Southern for someone in the high delta, or taking an easy afternoon in Oxford, Mississippi, or anywhere else in the Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama-Georgia block.  I know that to Robert Johnson and Honeyboy Edwards and Son House and  Muddy Waters and anyone else in Coahoma county that the South didn't go all that far north from where they were sitting. .In maps from sat 1850-1890 that area is called "the deep south"; seems to me that anytime you have a geographical location with a qualifying prefix, you're actually dealing with the real thing, everyone else without the prefix being pretenders, or just something else. 

Same too for the North--is everything above Washington D.C. northern?  I wouldn't tell my father that, being a Berkshire Hills (MA) boy; but that's another problem, especially to someone in Bangor.

So somewhere in all of this, after figuring out where all of these places start, somewhere in  there is a place in this country that rejects these geographical delineations--that's the place I'd like to find.  (When I was describing this idea yesterday to a friend, Renee, a Texan via way of Alabama--like many of the defenders of the Alamo--the answer came immediately:  "Kansas" she said.

I'm not sure I agree.  But then once I get past my immediate response (Texas without Trees), I start to think of a 3-D representation, trying to accommodate time.  I don't have answer for the place that isn't anywhere, but once you start drawing enough circles to signify where The North South East West is/are, there is sure to be a little spot that gets overlapped by all of the circles more often than any other place--and that is where I think you'll find Nowhere.

 

 

This wonderful map is from Charles Paullin and John K. Wright Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, Washington, Carnegie Institution, and New York, American Geographical Society, 1932. It is just so very interesting and unusual--I'm not so sure that I've seen another map quite like this, illustrating travel time and difficulty..  One major stand-alone feature here for me is the distance from New York City to my own area of the U.S., the southern Appalachian region of western North Carolina: it took six days to get to Savannah from NYC and two weeks (!) to get up here in the mountains, which looks to be about the same amount of time it took to get to the Chicago area.  Of course once you got to Asheville in 1830 you were, well, probably looking to get somewhere else. I'd take it that the turkey population vastly outnumbered the people.  Maybe the horses did, too.  Getting back on track here though the West in the U.S. at the time began just on the other side of the state of Tennessee, and it wasn't but a couple (?) of censuses before this that the West was right about at the Cumberland Gap/Ohio River basin region.

Perhaps this leads us to a more interesting if badly-asked question:  where does the American West begin? 

This is an awfully tricky question, best left to the answer that pops into your mind the instant you hear the question, before the problems of what the sentence entails creep in.

Locating where the West begins is a curious, personal adventure--is it on the other side of the Mississippi, or does it really start in Texas, and once in Texas does it start in Austin or the sleepy Brazos? Does it really begin where the sign says it did, at Meacham Field in Fort Worth?

It depends on the era, too, as we just said above; in the 18th century the American West was really out there with the makers of the martyr Bibles in Ephrata, which means that the rest of the  place was really very big.  And of course you can go all the way back to the beginning of European colonization here, all of North America was the West, at least to the people who were boarding the ships thousands of miles away across the Atlantic. And even once they got here the West was problematic--for the Spanish in the southlands there doesn't really seem to be a "west", only the northlands. In the 16th century the West was just creeping into Pennsylvania (Penn's Forests), and the French and Indian War in the mid 18th century was fought over the control of "the West", the crux of it all heading down to the forks of the Ohio at Pittsburgh.  Even in the late 18th century, the West was still not all that far away, relative to what we think of today, what with Kentucky being the first "Western" state admitted to the Union (in 1792).  It would probably be easiest just to say that the Mississippi River is the dividing line; after all, Lewis and Clark departed (in 1803) on their expedition from St. Louis (as did hundreds of thousands of other people later in the century who were seeking their new life in the West).  Then there's the West of Saul Steinberg. who puts the whole thing on the other side of the Hudson...I'm not so sure if the West didn't start for some people somewhere along 11th Ave.

And where does the West "end"?  Does the West make it all the way to California coast, or does it stop in the desert, east of Sacramento?  Do people think of Oregon and Washington as the West; certainly they're western, but are they The West?   To really complicate things, I guess you could define the middle of the West and look for the boundaries.  But the middle of the West usually seems to me to be flat and red and not terribly high; who's to say that a nice town in Colorado (Salida?) might not be the middle of the West, even if it is 7,000 feet high?   

Its a tricky question and probably most people have a different answer for it.  For that matter, what about the South?  Where does that begin? I'm in a southernish state, but I hardly think of Asheville as being in The South per se. Maybe we're too high; maybe the place over 2000' in elevation that are south of Pennsylvania are just Appalachia, and actually not part of the South.  Scotland Neck over on the other part of my state is definitely the South to me, but perhaps it isn't too much very Southern for someone in the high delta, or taking an easy afternoon in Oxford, Mississippi, or anywhere else in the Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama-Georgia block.  I know that to Robert Johnson and Honeyboy Edwards and Son House and  Muddy Waters and anyone else in Coahoma county that the South didn't go all that far north from where they were sitting. .In maps from sat 1850-1890 that area is called "the deep south"; seems to me that anytime you have a geographical location with a qualifying prefix, you're actually dealing with the real thing, everyone else without the prefix being pretenders, or just something else. 

Same too for the North--is everything above Washington D.C. northern?  I wouldn't tell my father that, being a Berkshire Hills (MA) boy; but that's another problem, especially to someone in Bangor.

So somewhere in all of this, after figuring out where all of these places start, somewhere in  there is a place in this country that rejects these geographical delineations--that's the place I'd like to find.  (When I was describing this idea yesterday to a friend, Renee, a Texan via way of Alabama--like many of the defenders of the Alamo--the answer came immediately:  "Kansas" she said.

I'm not sure I agree.  But then once I get past my immediate response (Texas without Trees), I start to think of a 3-D representation, trying to accommodate time.  I don't have answer for the place that isn't anywhere, but once you start drawing enough circles to signify where The North South East West is/are, there is sure to be a little spot that gets overlapped by all of the circles more often than any other place--and that is where I think you'll find Nowhere.

This wonderful map is from Charles Paullin and John K. Wright Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, Washington, Carnegie Institution, and New York, American Geographical Society, 1932. It is just so very interesting and unusual--I'm not so sure that I've seen another map quite like this, illustrating travel time and difficulty..  One major stand-alone feature here for me is the distance from New York City to my own area of the U.S., the southern Appalachian region of western North Carolina: it took six days to get to Savannah from NYC and two weeks (!) to get up here in the mountains, which looks to be about the same amount of time it took to get to the Chicago area.  Of course once you got to Asheville in 1830 you were, well, probably looking to get somewhere else. I'd take it that the turkey population vastly outnumbered the people.  Maybe the horses did, too.  Getting back on track here though the West in the U.S. at the time began just on the other side of the state of Tennessee, and it wasn't but a couple (?) of censuses before this that the West was right about at the Cumberland Gap/Ohio River basin region.

Perhaps this leads us to a more interesting if badly-asked question:  where does the American West begin? 

This is an awfully tricky question, best left to the answer that pops into your mind the instant you hear the question, before the problems of what the sentence entails creep in.

Locating where the West begins is a curious, personal adventure--is it on the other side of the Mississippi, or does it really start in Texas, and once in Texas does it start in Austin or the sleepy Brazos? Does it really begin where the sign says it did, at Meacham Field in Fort Worth?

It depends on the era, too, as we just said above; in the 18th century the American West was really out there with the makers of the martyr Bibles in Ephrata, which means that the rest of the  place was really very big.  And of course you can go all the way back to the beginning of European colonization here, all of North America was the West, at least to the people who were boarding the ships thousands of miles away across the Atlantic. And even once they got here the West was problematic--for the Spanish in the southlands there doesn't really seem to be a "west", only the northlands. In the 16th century the West was just creeping into Pennsylvania (Penn's Forests), and the French and Indian War in the mid 18th century was fought over the control of "the West", the crux of it all heading down to the forks of the Ohio at Pittsburgh.  Even in the late 18th century, the West was still not all that far away, relative to what we think of today, what with Kentucky being the first "Western" state admitted to the Union (in 1792).  It would probably be easiest just to say that the Mississippi River is the dividing line; after all, Lewis and Clark departed (in 1803) on their expedition from St. Louis (as did hundreds of thousands of other people later in the century who were seeking their new life in the West).  Then there's the West of Saul Steinberg. who puts the whole thing on the other side of the Hudson...I'm not so sure if the West didn't start for some people somewhere along 11th Ave.

And where does the West "end"?  Does the West make it all the way to California coast, or does it stop in the desert, east of Sacramento?  Do people think of Oregon and Washington as the West; certainly they're western, but are they The West?   To really complicate things, I guess you could define the middle of the West and look for the boundaries.  But the middle of the West usually seems to me to be flat and red and not terribly high; who's to say that a nice town in Colorado (Salida?) might not be the middle of the West, even if it is 7,000 feet high?   

Its a tricky question and probably most people have a different answer for it.  For that matter, what about the South?  Where does that begin? I'm in a southernish state, but I hardly think of Asheville as being in The South per se. Maybe we're too high; maybe the place over 2000' in elevation that are south of Pennsylvania are just Appalachia, and actually not part of the South.  Scotland Neck over on the other part of my state is definitely the South to me, but perhaps it isn't too much very Southern for someone in the high delta, or taking an easy afternoon in Oxford, Mississippi, or anywhere else in the Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama-Georgia block.  I know that to Robert Johnson and Honeyboy Edwards and Son House and  Muddy Waters and anyone else in Coahoma county that the South didn't go all that far north from where they were sitting. .In maps from sat 1850-1890 that area is called "the deep south"; seems to me that anytime you have a geographical location with a qualifying prefix, you're actually dealing with the real thing, everyone else without the prefix being pretenders, or just something else. 

Same too for the North--is everything above Washington D.C. northern?  I wouldn't tell my father that, being a Berkshire Hills (MA) boy; but that's another problem, especially to someone in Bangor.

So somewhere in all of this, after figuring out where all of these places start, somewhere in  there is a place in this country that rejects these geographical delineations--that's the place I'd like to find.  (When I was describing this idea yesterday to a friend, Renee, a Texan via way of Alabama--like many of the defenders of the Alamo--the answer came immediately:  "Kansas" she said.

I'm not sure I agree.  But then once I get past my immediate response (Texas without Trees), I start to think of a 3-D representation, trying to accommodate time.  I don't have answer for the place that isn't anywhere, but once you start drawing enough circles to signify where The North South East West is/are, there is sure to be a little spot that gets overlapped by all of the circles more often than any other place--and that is where I think you'll find Nowhere.

Ngrams: A Surprise with Two Words Unexpectedly Coming Together: "Bible" and "Television".

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

I'm having a little fun with the Google Ngram viewer--you can too!

• (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=&year_start=2000&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=) which if you look for the most recent date will default to 2008 and has a limit of 12 variables.

I'll just let these graphs speak for themselves. In the first graph I tried to beat "Frankenstein" with something popular but had a hard time, not finding anything (though just over a short period of time) but being very happy overall with the results. In the next graph I was mainly interested to see the difference in the use of "World War II", "Second World War", and "World War Two", and then threw in "Bible" and "television", and found the surprising "singularity" (well, not really). 

 

 

Bad Places to Be (1922)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post  (Part of the series on the History of Holes)

There could have been many dozens of posts in this sub category--many. There are posts dedicated to B-17 belly gunners, sappers tunneling under trenches, workers struggling away in the enormous and dank and terrifically unhealthy Brooklyn Bridges (not fireproof!) caissons, WWI coffin-like observation cars dangling from a 500'-long cable, and so on. (And as long as I've mentioned coffins, there are the illustrations of patent drawings showing people saving themselves from premature burial.) There's an endless variety of these situations though I've only identified a half-dozen or so in this blog of 4500+ posts. 

I never did add a subcategory for this and labeling posts in this way simply got away from me, though it did just return this morning seeing the adventures of the human mole man. This guy would've been made of slim steel to do what he did, as just the idea of it gives me some low stomach shivers. He's wearing half-overalls, a rudimentary mask, and with one flashlight in his right hand he's lowered 110' down a well that is just a little wider than his shoulders (20") to collect a stuck 150-lb bushing. (I just measured 20" across the width of my shoulders and I can say easily that I would've turned into a plug very quickly.)  Down the hole this man went, and emerged victorious, posing at the end of it all with his broken trophy.  It could've been worse--the hole could've been filled with water, or on fire, or filled with water on fire--but not by much.

[Source: Popular Mechanics, June 1922.]

A Not-So-Good Idea for Air Travel (1922)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This October issue of Popular Mechanics 1922 is robust! Here's another attractive piece of design with loads of character and one central question:  "why?"  The image is that of a giant aeroplane capable of hauling 100 or more souls (not this particular version, though) for long distance uninterrupted flight of 1000 miles--so in order for there to be no in-between landings the aircraft came equipped with a glider aircraft (an altogether different version of the "hang glider") that was released for the mother ship. As you can see it is a much smaller aircraft and looks to me to be pretty well packed, leading no doubt to questionable utility and much prayer. The thing is, why bother with another aircraft when you can just stop the plane and let people off? This beast was half-stopped in the air anyway by modern standards, probably chugging away at, what, 100mph? (The airspeed record at this time was just a touch over 200mph.) and it wasn't flying very high (relative to even 1950), so stopping may not have been such a big deal. The airport or air station wouldn't've been an issue either, because the glider would near to land somewhere. Anyway, I just couldn't figure out this piece of The Possible Future.

Car Travel for No Good Reason Whatsoever and "Motorist Road Homes" To Accommodate That (1922)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This diagram reminds me of an enormous and mega-completed versions of the imaginary Joey the Juices' "Stop 'n Go Inn 'n Out" motel down on the nice part of Rt. 1.  This exploded version of the motoring motel was meant for West Coast for travelers "aimlessly covering thousands of miles", a giant influx of people riding the wave of massive new car ownership. This ranch was to welcome 420 people with room for 80 cars--which means, I guess, that people were traveling together--really together--five to a car, which implies that there were a good number of people contributing in an organized way to "aimless" activity. Perhaps people were just doing a lot of serendipitous driving as an organized crew. In any event I'm pretty sure that I've not seen plans for a motor lodge of this size, and thought to share it, finding it in the pages of Popular Mechanics for October 1922. 

Given the birth of a much wider middle class, and the capacity for some disposable income, and access to cheap/affordable transportation and the roads to ride these new cars on, a large part of the working population of the U.S. did have the luxury at this point of travelling for the sheer hell of it. 

The Earliest Appearance in the U.S. of an Experiment Showing Lead in the Atmosphere? (1835)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2792

For various obscure and unknown reasons I rarely share a post from the books-for-sale section of this blog here in the "readerly" part. Today is an exception, mainly because I can't quite hammer down what it is I'm writing about and perhaps someone out there might be able to share what they know about it.  The post is on a scientific paper from the Journal of the Franklin Institute, a quick 1-pager from 1835 that caught my eye, a middle-of-the-page bit about lead in the atmosphere. I thought it sounded "early", this business of determining whether or not killer lead was in the air, and relatable to a lot of modern stuff, like human impact on the environment, lead-added gasoline, and that sort. So I checked it out. I couldn't determine exactly what this little paper was in the history of such literature, but I think that I came close:

The Earliest Appearance in the U.S. of an Experiment Showing Lead in the Atmosphere? (1835)

Arthur Dunn, “Experiments to ascertain the Existence of Lead in the Atmosphere of a White Lead Manufactory”, pp 355-6. In: Journal of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Vol 16 (third series), volume 20 (overall), July-December 1835, 438 pp, with text illustrations.  Half-calf, with raised bands. Ex-library, with some scuffing on the spine; also a few stamps on the title page. Nice copy. Good condition.  (There are dozens of other papers of interest in this volume--this seems to be the most compelling of the group.)

• This paper seems among the earliest printed in the U.S. to experimentally demonstrate the presence of lead in the atmosphere. It is also suggestive of what would become the concern of human impact on the environment.

The issue of lead poisoning was considerable—people became sick by touching, drinking, and breathing in lead under many different circumstances. For example, poisoning occurred when lead was used in paint by breathing or touching or eating paint chips, the most harmed of those would be the color mixers who prepared the paint. There was also a problem with lead caused by eating it in the form of food coloring for bread (to give it a yellowish tint using ‘chrome yellow”), candies, bon bons, and an emulsifier for snuff, among many other things. Lead was also ingested via the use of lead utensils, pipes, and drinking ware.

The deadly problem of lead sickness/poisoning (“colic”) was known to the Hippocrates, Nicander, Celsus, Dioscorides, Galen, Avicenna and other ancients of Greece, Rome, and Persia, and was a known concern through the Dark and Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and up to the present day. (It should be stated that some of these writers described the effects of lead poisoning without the association with lead.) It was Stockhausen, “the father of lead colic”, who would in the 18^th establish the connection between lead and the diseases caused by it, with Henkel showing lead as the exclusive vector agent to the diseases (in 1812).

It has been shown that the “(f)irst article about lead poisoning was published in 1848” by Samuel L. Dana¹. This was the first translation and expansion of the article “Traits des Maladies de Plomb, ou Saturines”, by Tanquerel des Planches, which was published nine years earlier, in 1839, which has been noted as one of the earliest papers in the medical literature on lead poisoning. ^2,3 The Dana translation, according to the American Journal of Science, was a great contribution to health in the U.S., as the Tanquerel des Planches work was “doubtless unknown to intelligent readers of this country”. American Journal of Science, volume 6, November 1848.

I have been unable to find anything by Dunn, whose work is reprinted in the Philosophical Magazine five months earlier in the year (series III, vol 7, issue 31). There are other earlier works that come close to what Dunn is doing⁴, but so far as I can determine this seems to be the first to prove that the lead could be supported in the atmosphere and be breathed into the body (or absorbed through the eyes), something that no doubt was suspected but not demonstrated. 

Notes

1.  Lead Diseases: A Treatise from the French of L. Tanquerel Des Planches: With Notes and Additions on the Use of Lead Pipe and Its Substitutes, printed in Lowell, (Ma.), by Daniel Bixby & Co., 1848)--Parissa Karrari  et al., “A systematic review on status of lead pollution and toxicity in Iran; Guidance for preventive measures” (--Daru Jnl Pharmaceutical  Sciences, 2012; 20(1): 2:.
2. “The medical literature on lead poisoning in children can be traced back to the work of Louis Tanquerel des Planches he remarked on children placing leadpainted toys in their mouths and developing lead colic. As early as 1887, medical authorities in the United States noted cases of lead poisoning. David Stewart reported in Medical News that nine members of a single family developed lead poisoning from lead chromate used to dye bread yellow. [Stewart, “Notes on some obscure cases on poisoning by lead chromate manifested chiefly by encephalopathy.” Med News 1887; 1:676-81. 11.] In the 19th century, lead chromate was often added to lead sulfate to form what was called “chrome yellow,” a substance used by bakers and candy makers as a coloring agent. In 1889, an article in Science reported on the deaths of two children from the ingestion of baked confectioners’ products that contained chrome yellow. [Glenn W. Chrome yellow considered as a poison. Science 1889; 13:347-9. 12.]”— David Rosner, et al, "Lockhart Gibson and the Discovery of the Impact of Lead Pigments on Children's Health: A Review of a Century of Knowledge”, Public Health Reports (1974-) Vol. 120, No. 3 (May - June., 2005), pp. 296-300
3. On Louis Tanquerel des Planches (1795-1868): “He is known for his research of lead poisoning, about which, he is credited with conducting one of the first comprehensive studies of occupational illness. By way of analysis of 1200 cases of lead poisoning at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris, he reported that the disease was more frequently found in workers who were exposed to lead fumes than those who worked with the solid metal. In his studies he used the term encéphalopathie saturnine to point out neuropsychiatric indications of lead poisoning.”—Wiki
4. But then there’s this earlier paper (1830), which certainly describes the consequences of lead in a closed environment but does not discus at any point any experiment to show that this is so: “…favorables à la production du mal Qui ne sait que parmi les professions qui exposent à la colique on compte celle d imprimeur c est à dire celle de compositeur ou de metteur en page en un mot celle des ouvriers qui manient les caractères Car je ne sache pas qu on voie fréquemment cette maladie attaquer les corrcctcurs ou autres employés qui vivent dans la même atmosphère si l on se rappelle en outre que le plomb n entre que pour une très faible proportion dans l alliage dont on se sert Pour les caractères Qn comprendra qu il est fort difficile qu il s en échappe en grande quantité des émanations saturines et que ce n est que par un contact Inumédiat que l infection doit avoir lieu…” -discussing the problems to employees handling lead type in a print shop.  Fouquier, “Colique de Plombe, Nature et Traitement” (Revue Clinque de la Medicale), in Gazette Medical, vol 1, 1830, pp 430-1

 

Arthur Dunn, “Experiments to ascertain the Existence of Lead in the Atmosphere of a White Lead Manufactory”, pp 355-6. In: Journal of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Vol 16 (third series), volume 20 (overall), July-December 1835, 438 pp, with text illustrations.  Half-calf, with raised bands. Ex-library, with some scuffing on the spine; also a few stamps on the title page. Nice copy. Good condition.  (There are dozens of other papers of interest in this volume--this seems to be the most compelling of the group.)

• This paper seems among the earliest printed in the U.S. to experimentally demonstrate the presence of lead in the atmosphere. It is also suggestive of what would become the concern of human impact on the environment.

The issue of lead poisoning was considerable—people became sick by touching, drinking, and breathing in lead under many different circumstances. For example, poisoning occurred when lead was used in paint by breathing or touching or eating paint chips, the most harmed of those would be the color mixers who prepared the paint. There was also a problem with lead caused by eating it in the form of food coloring for bread (to give it a yellowish tint using ‘chrome yellow”), candies, bon bons, and an emulsifier for snuff, among many other things. Lead was also ingested via the use of lead utensils, pipes, and drinking ware.

The deadly problem of lead sickness/poisoning (“colic”) was known to the Hippocrates, Nicander, Celsus, Dioscorides, Galen, Avicenna and other ancients of Greece, Rome, and Persia, and was a known concern through the Dark and Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and up to the present day. (It should be stated that some of these writers described the effects of lead poisoning without the association with lead.) It was Stockhausen, “the father of lead colic”, who would in the 18^th establish the connection between lead and the diseases caused by it, with Henkel showing lead as the exclusive vector agent to the diseases (in 1812).

It has been shown that the “(f)irst article about lead poisoning was published in 1848” by Samuel L. Dana¹. This was the first translation and expansion of the article “Traits des Maladies de Plomb, ou Saturines”, by Tanquerel des Planches, which was published nine years earlier, in 1839, which has been noted as one of the earliest papers in the medical literature on lead poisoning. ^2,3 The Dana translation, according to the American Journal of Science, was a great contribution to health in the U.S., as the Tanquerel des Planches work was “doubtless unknown to intelligent readers of this country”. American Journal of Science, volume 6, November 1848.

I have been unable to find anything by Dunn, whose work is reprinted in the Philosophical Magazine five months earlier in the year (series III, vol 7, issue 31). There are other earlier works that come close to what Dunn is doing⁴, but so far as I can determine this seems to be the first to prove that the lead could be supported in the atmosphere and be breathed into the body (or absorbed through the eyes), something that no doubt was suspected but not demonstrated. 

Notes

1.  Lead Diseases: A Treatise from the French of L. Tanquerel Des Planches: With Notes and Additions on the Use of Lead Pipe and Its Substitutes, printed in Lowell, (Ma.), by Daniel Bixby & Co., 1848)--Parissa Karrari  et al., “A systematic review on status of lead pollution and toxicity in Iran; Guidance for preventive measures” (--Daru Jnl Pharmaceutical  Sciences, 2012; 20(1): 2:.
2. “The medical literature on lead poisoning in children can be traced back to the work of Louis Tanquerel des Planches he remarked on children placing leadpainted toys in their mouths and developing lead colic. As early as 1887, medical authorities in the United States noted cases of lead poisoning. David Stewart reported in Medical News that nine members of a single family developed lead poisoning from lead chromate used to dye bread yellow. [Stewart, “Notes on some obscure cases on poisoning by lead chromate manifested chiefly by encephalopathy.” Med News 1887; 1:676-81. 11.] In the 19th century, lead chromate was often added to lead sulfate to form what was called “chrome yellow,” a substance used by bakers and candy makers as a coloring agent. In 1889, an article in Science reported on the deaths of two children from the ingestion of baked confectioners’ products that contained chrome yellow. [Glenn W. Chrome yellow considered as a poison. Science 1889; 13:347-9. 12.]”— David Rosner, et al, "Lockhart Gibson and the Discovery of the Impact of Lead Pigments on Children's Health: A Review of a Century of Knowledge”, Public Health Reports (1974-) Vol. 120, No. 3 (May - June., 2005), pp. 296-300
3. On Louis Tanquerel des Planches (1795-1868): “He is known for his research of lead poisoning, about which, he is credited with conducting one of the first comprehensive studies of occupational illness. By way of analysis of 1200 cases of lead poisoning at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris, he reported that the disease was more frequently found in workers who were exposed to lead fumes than those who worked with the solid metal. In his studies he used the term encéphalopathie saturnine to point out neuropsychiatric indications of lead poisoning.”—Wiki
4. But then there’s this earlier paper (1830), which certainly describes the consequences of lead in a closed environment but does not discus at any point any experiment to show that this is so: “…favorables à la production du mal Qui ne sait que parmi les professions qui exposent à la colique on compte celle d imprimeur c est à dire celle de compositeur ou de metteur en page en un mot celle des ouvriers qui manient les caractères Car je ne sache pas qu on voie fréquemment cette maladie attaquer les corrcctcurs ou autres employés qui vivent dans la même atmosphère si l on se rappelle en outre que le plomb n entre que pour une très faible proportion dans l alliage dont on se sert Pour les caractères Qn comprendra qu il est fort difficile qu il s en échappe en grande quantité des émanations saturines et que ce n est que par un contact Inumédiat que l infection doit avoir lieu…” -discussing the problems to employees handling lead type in a print shop.  Fouquier, “Colique de Plombe, Nature et Traitement” (Revue Clinque de la Medicale), in Gazette Medical, vol 1, 1830, pp 430-1

 

Bombing Tokyo with Dollars (1943)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is part of a report of the Bridgeport Brass Company for 1943 detailing the company's activities in the war effort. This was apart from the general war products industry, and included what the company was doing in response to the U.S. War Production Board's outline for pulling together labor and management in joint committees to solidify the extreme national war effort. One small part of that was the donation of a portion of every paycheck--the suggested amount was 10%--that would be used towards war production. The poster below was a reminder to folks in the factories about where and how that money was being used:

On Unconditional Surrender (1943)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I found this arresting map in a tiny publication called ...Sans Condition, which was published in the first half of 1943. The publication is only 12 pages long but has a number of evocative images of Germany being bombed and lines of German POWs--it is in general a propaganda piece for French-speaking folk (which was printed god-knows-where) produced deep in the war and at a time when the tide has about turned on the Nazis.  The term "Sans Conditions" refers to "Unconditional surrender", which was a phrase that President Roosevelt surprisingly used when meeting with Allied leaders at Casablanca in January 1943. It is a term that doesn't make many appearances in U.S. military history, though it was famously endorsed by General U.S. Grant in 1862 in response to an entreaty from Confederate general Simon Bolivar Buckner jr.--and as it happened a U.S. general by the same name was killed om Okinawa by a direct hit from a Japanese heavy gun. Roosevelt would send the same directive to the government of Japan at Potsdam July 26, 1945 (later modified somewhat to accommodate the Japanese keeping their emperor). 

The title of this post is the title of the map,  "Ils ont decide ou, quand et comment les Allies lanceront leurs attacques"--and you don't need to know French to know what it says.