JF Ptak Science Books

Outsider Logic: The Healing Properties of Color (1930)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post    Part of the Outsider Logic series

Aha. Here we have a curious piece of multiple fakery of color combinations presented in blue-and-white. It was written by Col. Dinshah P. Ghadiali in 1930 in support of his system of projecting color on people to cure them of an encyclopedia of ills which all happen to be color-induced from color “disturbances”. In short, Ghadiali (who claimed to be “M.D, M.E., D.C., Ph.D., LL.D, &c.”) insisted that, for example,  the body consisted of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, which were “colored” blue. Red, green, and yellow, somehow. Sicknesses were imbalances of the color of the components of the body, and the “spectro-chrome” system would project the deficient light and who-knows-what-else to do impossibly mysterious nothing and everything to everything and nothing. The one thing Dinshah was successful at was selling his very expensive projector (for $90 to $650 dollars)--diligent enough in his promotion and his key to cancer and scrofula that he sold a million dollars worth of his worthless trickery.

Maybe he believed in this tripe, and maybe not. I include a couple of examples of the artwork of the author to include in my series on Outsider Logic:

Found-Art Sci-Art: Fractalian Wing of a Borges Library?

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The title for the source of this image--"On Crystals Enclosed in Blow-Pipe Beads"--is nearly as lyrical as the image itself, and obscurely residing in The Monthly Microscopical Journal, volume 1, published in London in 1869.  What is unusual in this instance (at least for my experience) is that the author, H.C. Sorby, takes a moment to remark on the "extreme beauty", which is generally not the case, a mention regarding beauty seldom appearing. Removing a part from the whole (seen below) the crystals challenge the imagination, and if you take a moment it is possible to see that crystal #4 is one small fractal-like section of the tip of one linear crystal section of #3, which in tern is a small part of #2, which again is a micro-section of #1. 

Full image, following, with each of the individual crystals displayed:

When the Words Feel Like the Bad Paper They're Written On--Trashing Frederick Douglass (1895)

JF Ptak Science Books  

1895 was a great big year in science--there were major contributions by Cantor, Poincare, Ramsay, and Perrin, among others, though the biggest of them all was the semi-accidental discovery by Roentgen of X-rays, a monument in the pursuit of further/deeper.

My own little 1895 discovery last night may be a well-established bit but was unknown to me, and it proved to be the opposite of further/deeper. I was trying to squeeze some life out of what looked like a pamphlet as dry and brittle as the bad newsprint it was made of:  History of the General Assembly of North Carolina, January 9-March 15, 1895, Inclusive (printed by E.M. Uzzell in Raleigh, 1895), which sounds just flat-out anti-interesting (especially with the very specialized time period).  It turns out that the 160-page work is written in a easy, journalismo sub-Menckian way, with a nod to humor here and there and a dose of familiarity, a good narrative style that was useful and breezy.

And as I hunted for some sparkly point in the daily comings and goings of the legislature, I ran right into the dark void.

The hole was a short report, “The Douglass Infamy”, which was an infamy of its own. Over the few pages of the article/review it discussed the  “humiliation of the white people of the south” caused by the General Assembly of the legislature choosing to suspend and adjourn their meeting out of respect  for Frederick Douglass, who had suddenly died during the session. The author referred to the action as "an offense against the dignity and sentiments of this proud State" ("State" is capitalized, "Negro" is not),  Douglass to as “the miscegentionist" straight-away after condemning the act of respect due the man, and was an "...author of many malignant and untruthful aspersions on the whites",  and referred to his as "an inferior race, incapable of civilization except for that under the whites".  Closing down the government was a "humiliation to white people" and disgusted some legislators to the point where they denied that the action had taken place. I think this was because it elevated Douglass to a level of equality, which just would not do: "The whites of North Carolina...regard any approach by the Negro to social equality with...abhorence [sic]". 

The was a significant amount of hateful nonsense in this entry, railing against Douglass, who in their view wrote terrible untruths about white people and who was “also guilty of miscegenation”, having married a white woman.  

“Thoughtful Democrats who have looked beyond the present moment and who have preferred to bear such party ills as they had, if such there were, rather than fly to others they knew not of, predicted that the fusion with Republicans of any considerable number of those who were formerly Democrats meant Republican domination, and that Republican domination meant, in one form or another, negro [sic] domination. The Douglas incident reveals the animus of that party and is a menace of its aims. (After the official declaration of the Fusionists, the General Assembly did not adjourn in honor of the birthday of Robert E. Lee, a legal holiday, but did adjourn out of respect for the memory of Frederick Douglas.)”

Finding this article was not surprising, really, though it was unexpected to some degree; there were a few other bits in the pamphlet similar to this, so the article did not stand alone. The part that is so amazing is that it the "Douglass Infamy" was just part and parcel of a documentary and interpretive  report on the action of the state legislature for a few months in 1895; and yet, there was this hateful business, taking up as much space and brain waves as noting that it was a cloudy day.  

Found Art: Artwork on the Walls of Environments in Comic Books (Spaceship Art 1951)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

It seems to me that comic books have a place, sort of, in my work in the history of science and culture. They were issued and purchased in huge numbers, in the millions and tens of millions, and no doubt were perhaps one of the most significant ports of entry to national/mass culture in the pre-digital era for kids and beyond. How else is a relatively-unfiltered national theme going to reach a child in 1951? There's early t.v., some radio, maybe newspapers (with daily and Sunday comics)...and not much else, outside of comic books. So it may be interesting when it was that a first or early appearance and introduction of a major idea is delivered to a young reading world--like the first mentions of concentration camps (which appear in comic books long before they appear in school textbooks), the first use of the atomic bomb and its effects on Hiroshima, and that sort of thing. (Some of these offhand pursuits resulted in very unusual finds, like one that I reported on for what must certainly be about one of the first appearances anywhere of "E=mc^2" in this exact form appearing in a comic book in 1945--and this where it was being written on a chalkboard by Einstein, making it also perhaps the earliest visual connection of E with the equation together in print before Einstein first writes using the exact equation in 1946...that sounds like all sorts of wrong and a bit goofy, and there's a lot of the use of "perhaps", but the story seems to be accurate.)

Anyway, maybe there's something useful in these found bits, and maybe not. I'm addressing this today because of another found bit and perhaps a new and probably very shrt and shallow category: artwork found on the walls in comic books.  I must say I've never thought of the issue until half-a-coffee ago, when I spotted a framed artwork in the study of  a space detective in the first issue of, of course, Space Detective #1, 1951. The space detective in question is The Avenger, helped along by his aide etc. Tina, and secretary Dot, as they solve crimes on Earth, Venus, and Mars--in this first adventure they are going after Mars bandit Maag, which led them to another adventure in stopping Venusian opium trade. Anyway it is all a very long way from Sam Spade (sooo close to "Sam Space, Earth Detective") and Picard's interplanetary-though-still-in-San-Francisco Dixon Hill.  

In any event, here it is, the art:

(Image found at the extremely useful and massive Digital Comic Museum https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/preview/index.php?did=10240&page=3)

It seems like an awfully slow bus to Abilene to get us to this point, talking about a forgotten little splotch on two forgotten pages of a forgotten comic book from 1951, but as I said, artwork in ephemeral mass publications like this have never been on my radar (and probably with just cause) though perhaps they went unnoticed because they just didn't appear? Hard for me to say as I am not a comic book person outside of looking for specific odd things, but my initial reaction to seeing the art must've rubbed up against some unconscious collected memories to show itself as being unusual, so maybe there's a little bit of "there" there.  

 

Geronimo Finally Defeated: of Miles, miles, and the Sun (1886)

JF Ptak Science Books  (Expanding on an earlier post from 2011.)

The Chiricahuan Apache leader and chief, Geronimo (1829-1909), famously led a progressively diminishing band  through the  Apache Wars of the 1850's-1880's.  For thirty  years of so he quirted the U.S. Cavalry, darting here and there in great exploits and famous escapes, evading the armies of the United States and Mexico.  In the end, by 1886, there were just dozens who were following him, including women and children, and the elderly, ragged, tired, hungry, and pretty much, finally, beaten. A graphic display of this end is found in this terrific map:

Outline Map of the Field of Operations against Hostile Chiricahuan Indians showing operations from April 12th, 1886 to the date of their Surrender 4th, 1886, which is a large, 29x25-inch folding black and white map lithographed by the American Graphic Company.¹  [It covers all of Arizona and New Mexico south of 34 degrees N, from Phoenix on the west to not quite Roswell on the east, northern Sonora to well below Hermosillo, and extreme west Texas, and locates at least 40 army forts, camps and posts, as well as innumerable railroad whistle stops, ranches, and water holes...and of course locations of heliographic stations.]

.

I think what finally did Geronimo in were the miles of pursuit and the sun. 

The sun got to him via the heliographic communication network established by Major W.J, Volkman under the direction of General Nelson Miles (the other "miles" of this equation of defeat), which allowed the pursuing American army to communicate instantaneously over great distances, over hundreds of miles, without the need for runners or men or horseback or cutable telegraph wires or time  The heliograph is an ancient instrument, used for more than two thousand years--in this case, they were very highly polished mirrors that reflected brilliant signals between stations, getting their light source from the sun. It allowed the army an enormous advantage, and one that finally caught up to Geronimo.

The "miles" were just those, the thousands of miles Geronimo was tracked and retracked over that very difficult terrain in the southeastern part of Arizona and into northern Mexico, sharp mountains, endless badlands, caves, heat, height, cold....very difficult. (I've been there on treks.. .its tough land.)

The capitalized "Miles" was the surname of General Nelson A. Miles who sent out  with Lt. Col. George F. Crook to track down and capture Geronimo--and they almost did, again, in late March, 1886, when Geronimo presumably surrendered, but then fled to Mexico. After another five months and 1,600 miles, Miles came upon Geronimo om in Sonoran mountain camp, and induced him for the final time in September, 1886, at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona.

The details of the capture and surrender are told in many places by many others--I just wanted to surface the role of the sun in the capture of Geronimo.

The old man was shipped east,  never to see Arizona again. He died after being thrown from his horse and contracting pneumonia as a result of being unable to help himself to safety through a long cold night, died in a bed as a prisoner in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.

"Separate Cinema"--100 All-Black Movies for Rent, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is well outside what I usually write about here, but I could not resist sharing this interesting find.  "All Negro Cast Features" is a five-page section in a 150pp film distributor catalog from 1944, listing 100 all-Black movies for rent. I know very little about this genre of film-making, but in checking out some sites dedicated to the subject I found that only about a third of the hundred were mentioned—which of course sparks curiosity and interest.  

 [See the wonderful "Separate Cinema" site from whom I borrowed the phrase in the title to this quick post at http://www.separatecinema.com/exhibits_vintageyears.html (with posters!); also the IMDb/Afro-Centric Film Collaborative "Definitive List of  Black Movies from the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's," which as it turns out lists only 32 films from the 1940s.]

The “All Negro” offerings (no films in the catalog are dated) included 37 features ranging from 1931-1944, with ten in the 1930's and three in the 1940's. Only 12 of these are referenced in full on the Separate Cinema site, with four others tangentially mentioned and dated. There are then two pages  of shorter, movies including: Short Subjects (14 films), "1-Reel All-Negro Cast Subjects (16 films), "Features with Prominent Negroes..." (4 films), "Cabin Kid Comedies" (8 1-reel films), "Musicals" (9 1-reel), "Joe Louis Fights" (9 1&2-reel films), and "Spice of Your Program" (3 2-reels).

Some of the descriptions for the feature films are spare, some not, though even the quick descriptions of some of these movies are captivating--for example, for Harlem is Heaven (1932), the entry reads "Bill Robinson, the dark cloud of joy with Eubie Blake's orchestra".  On the other hand, the description for Marching On reads "the picture that leaves you gasping" without any reference to it being one of the very few films dealing with African American military life during WWII.  

In any event someone out there in Interwebtubelandia may find this list useful or supplementary.

All of the images of the text are expandable:

 

Churchill and the Conservatives Abandoned--an anti-Labour Pamphlet of 1946

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Even though Churchill was enormously popular in the public mind (well over 80% approval rate in 1945...I guess the question would have been what was up with the remained who disapproved?) the Conservatives and Churchill with them were utterly swept away from power in the general election of the summer of '45, in the heights of victory in Europe and before the war in the Pacific was not yet ended. Clement Attlee was in charge as head of Labour—he was very skilled and competent and accomplished, though these characters were not manifest in his public persona, hardly a Churchill who shone through and through. It all made sense, in its way, though it was a shocking turn of the screw in the U.S. That's not to say that the Conservatives weren't shocked, though at least there was an understanding on that turn of affairs came to be. I doubt that was the case in D.C.

In any event, this pamphlet shows the vestiges of political posters for the '45 election a year or so later, promises that in their future looked not-so-good what with rationing still going on, a problematic economy, housing issues, battle weariness, and so on. The pamphlet was written by the Conservatives who tried to remind voters that Labour's labour has been lost, and one should return the privilege of government to the Conservatives. That wouldn't happen for almost another 10 years, when they and Churchill made their return in 1955.

The cover is very striking, and makes a clear point.

(It seems this is a rare pamphlet--I can find only one copy accounted for in WorldCat/OCLC, and that in the British Library.)

10,000 Windows Filled with Cigarettes (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Vincent Riggio (1878-1960) was a classic rags-to-riches story: Sicilian-born, lower East Side, quit school to work, opened barber shop on 117th, etc., and by 1947 was one of the highest paid execs in the country at $484k/yr., heading up sales for the American Tobacco Company.(Its hard to translate this wealth, even after fiddling with CPI—at the time though 30 million of the 39 million families in the US Census for 1950 made less than $5k/yr.)

Anyway Riggio wrote a Christmastime book¹ in 1938 on "Sales Organization" for the ATC, a piece of boosterism and a how-to for sales of cigarettes and the beauty they represented. One part that stopped me was the instruction on filling “10,000” windows in high-traffic areas with ciggie displays.  There were 93 cities in the US with 100k or more population in 1930 (105 in 1940, 50 in 1910, and 68 in 1920) so even if the windows concentrated on the big cities that’s 100 big windows (think classic giant window displays busy intersection) per each of the 100 cities. That’s in addition to massive amount of print ads and radio/sporting event sponsorships. (And remember the print ads used movie stars, doctors, lawyers, Santa, sports figures, and so on, plus the combination of the cigarette with the possibility of expressive manhood AND sexual allure.) These folks got their message across, which was too bad. 

And for the record ATC was founded in 1890 by Buck Duke, and was one of the original 12 companies² comprising the first index for the Dow Jones averages (1896). ATC was busted³ in 1911 as a monopoly, after which it became a simple oligopoly.

Notes:

1. Riggio, Vincent. American Tobacco Company, Sales Organization. Printed by ATC on fine laid paper. 7”x5”, 61pp. Embossed cloth.  I can’t find this in WorldCat/OCLC.  

2. The twelve companies included American Cotton Oil, American Sugar, American Tobacco, Chicago Gas, Distilling & Cattle Feeding, General Electric, Laclede Gas, National Lead, North American, Tennessee Coal & Iron, U.S. Leather preferred, and U.S. Rubber.

3. United States v. American Tobacco Company, 221 U.S. 106 (1911), “...which held that the combination in this case is one in restraint of trade and an attempt to monopolize the business of tobacco in interstate commerce within the prohibitions of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.”--Wikipedia

A Remedial Introduction to "Politics" for Newly-Enfranchised Women in the U.K. (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

To Women Voters¹--a short and thin-lipped tearsheet printed by Sir Joseph Causton (viz Midsomer!) of London--was printed in 1918 for the Lloyd George U.K. Coalition Government.  (The coalition government of Lloyd George lasted until 1922 when it was replaced by that of Bonar Law.) It was printed in response to the Representation of the People Act of 1918², which enfranchised a certain set of women to the vote. This pamphlet was a very remedial introduction to the most basic ideas of government,  defining the subjects of “Politics”, “Duties of Citizenship”, and the “Coalition Government”, mostly in the service of having the women who could vote and would do so to vote for the Lloyd George ministry. The writer made a brittle assumption that women knew nothing about government and politics, and proceeded accordingly.

I've reprinted the pamphlet below. 

Notes:

1.  8.5” x 5.5”, 4pp (one sheet folded in half).  Provenance: from the collection of Prof. E.D. Adams to Leland Stanford Jr University, and then the Library of Congress. The LC surplus stamp is on back cover, while the small Stanford stamp is at the bottom of page 2.  

2. “The Representation of the People Act 1918 widened suffrage by abolishing practically all property qualifications for men and by enfranchising women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications. The enfranchisement of this latter group was accepted as recognition of the contribution made by women defence workers. However, women were still not politically equal to men (who could vote from the age of 21); full electoral equality was achieved in Ireland in 1922, but did not occur in Britain until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928.”--Wikipedia

A Beautiful Apocalypse (1508)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This vision of The Apocalypse doesn't look overwhelmingly apocalpse-y, to me, but the message was put across to the viewer that something bad was happening, what with the hail and brimstone and lightning and fire being visited upon the dissolving church in the background and the murdered clergy in the foreground. The woodcut appeared in Joseph Gruenbeck's Speculum naturalis coelestis & propheticae visionis, printed in Nuremberg in October 1508, being a short (18 leaves) prognostication on the fate of humankind and its wicked ways. It is a very orderly fall from grace, but a fall nevertheless, and the reader no doubt was reminded of the waiting ring of fire. 

A Shadowy, Watery Window into Early Flight (1907)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

It seeped into recognition that the photo below is remarkable to my experience for showing an early airplane being pushed through a puddle--marsh, actually--prior to flight, and we can see its progress and its helpers in a  reflection in the water. Now it is easy to find an aircraft with pontoons made for a watery environment, but the other, well, it seems to be remarkable to me. The photo  is from Henry de la Vaux's  heavy and highly illustrated Le Triomphe de la Navigation Aerienne, Aeroplanes, Dirigiables Spheriques, printed in Paris in 1911, and shows the Euro-famous Henri Farman's Voisin aeroplane across an inundated section of the fields at Issy.  Farman used this aircraft (made by Gabriel and Charles Voisin of Aeroplanes Voisin, founded 1905) in March 1907 and “… flew the first successful powered aircraft designed by aeronautical engineer… to make the first heavier-than-air flight lasting more than a minute in Europe, and also to make the first full circle”. (Wikipedia) And yet for that the thing that attracts me to this photo, found serendipitiously while flipping through the pages of the big book, was were the reflection of the underside of the plane in the mirror surface of the wet field. Simple, and unusual.  

And the full image:

"Not like Soldiers, but like Devils" (1915)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Posts

I've looked through all of the issues of the very-popular magazine, the Illustrated London News, for the First World War and I think that the image below is one of the most harrowing of all of the early images of combat that I've seen. The artist, S. Begg, depicts a charge by British units on a German trench during the Battle of Loos (25-September--8 October, 1915) in what was ultimately a losing campaign for the British, costing them 59,000 casualties to the German 26,000.  "Not like Soldiers, but like Devils" is the title of the work, and shows British "Territorials" (evidently a volunteer force used to supplement the professional soldiers) attacking a German line with drawn bayonets and hurled grenades--a lot of grenades. For some reason the main figure in front is throwing a grenade with his rifle shouldered, unlike virtually everyone else. The Brits are wearing gas masks in the charge, no doubt expecting a gas response from the Germans--at some point during this battle the British employ their own gas warfare weapons for the first time in the war.  

The full scene:

 

The Dimming of the Harsh Light and the Beauty of Manual Work

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This slightly altered detail is from the central perspective of a photo of workers completing the base for a 10 million cubic foot gas tank¹ in Chicago, and appeared in the Scientific American on 23 January 1920. It is a great photo of the beginnings of a considerable project, and the full image (below) stands on its own as a visual accommodation of a segmented space soon to be occupied by something enormous. That said, the guy in the middle of it all caught my attention in all of this. Was he a standard laborer out of position amidst the 200-odd other people there as the shot was being made, wondering where it was he was supposed to be? Or was that a foreman, or somebody else with the freedom to walk around as the great mass fell into position to take care of the job at hand? 

Notes

1. It was a big tank: 10,000,000 cu ft is about 75,000,000 gallons, weighing in at about half-a-billion pounds, which is a lot. By spacing out the guys on the perimeter of the base I make it that the circumference of the structure was about 400'. 

 

Found Art: Tunnels of Wind and Water

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This addition to the Found Art category (sub-cat of the Found-Dadaist thread) comes today from Creations Techniques Francaises ("French Engineering Achievements", 1935), which is a pretty straightforward semi-propagandist/glowy work with two gems tucked inside. The first is a lovely image of the business-end of an aeronautical wind tunnel designed by Le Marec for full-sized aircraft at Chalais-Meudon, an elliptical structure 81'x55':

The other tunnel is found a few pages later in the Rove Canal/Canal du Rove (opened in 1927), which is 4.6 miles long and 72' wide, which at the time was the longest underground canal in the world. The picture below is an image made at one end of the tunnel, the point of light in the distance is the other end, 4.6 miles away:

The Beauty of the Nuts-and-Bolts of Bolts and Nuts (1864)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post 

So, at first glance, this chart may look like a simple statement of nut and bolts specs. The importance of this chart is its commonplace appearance, and the overt statements about what all of these size and parameters should be, establishing a common denominator, a standard. Even though nuts and bolts had been around for at least 400 years when this chart appeared in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in 1864 (and threaded bolts and screws long before that), the idea of standardization of this hardware really hadn't taken place until Joseph Whitworth gave the idea life in 1841. The nut and bolt industry was well underway, except that for X manufacturers there could be X-number of varieties of nut and bolt sizes from one location to another (near or far), which made things difficult for the end-user, as they could basically be using a proprietary design with their hardware. Standardization made it possible to buy a certain size nut in one country and mate it with the necessary bolt from another country (etc.) with the capacity of knowing that one will fit the other, which is a big deal. In any event, here's a table of a U.S. attempt to codify those dimensions. 

        [See: W.R. Wilson,  The History of the Nut and Bolt Industry in America, 1905.]