JF Ptak Science Books

A Vision of the Future: 1911 Takes a Look at 1950.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2802

While pacing through a volume of Technical World for December 1911 I found an interesting paper on what the world of the future--in 1950--held for the average person in 1911.  

Introduction

“Wait! Every ten years in America sees a revolution. Industrial phases assume new proportions, commerce enlarges its borders to rush over strange seas, politics become a tangled web during its evolutionary processes, economic problems broaden their scope. Were the possibilities of the great labor divisions of the world gauged by the strides made during the last fifty years, one would stand in wholesome awe of the vision. The last word in the reconstruction of America is far from being said, though tireless workers of science are constantly forming the new America out of natural forces already largely under their control.”

Air travel and airplanes

--“Charles K. Hamilton recently stated that the form of aeroplane now in use can be indefinitely increased in size, and that the speed and carrying power can be proportionately augmented. He believes the limited size of aeroplanes, thus far, to be merely a question of cost,...This will come today or tomorrow, and after that will come the Mauretanias of the air. In 1950 we may have air-ships a thousand feet long, flying at a rate of speed so high as to bring New York and London as near together as New York and Chicago now are.

--Thomas Edison: “...the most serious difficulty to be overcome in aerial navigation—the difficulty of carrying fuel. “I do not know how to do it,” says the inventor of the phonograph, “but a method will be discovered of wirelessly transmitting electrical energy from the earth to the motor of a machine in mid air. There is no reason to believe it cannot be done.”

History of the Past and History of the Future: Communications and Electronics in the Year 2012 (from 1962)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2803 (Reference Tools Post) 

Now HERE'S a wonderful and referenced and deep look at the history and future of electronics, and one that I believe is very overlooked. The article has the slightly opaque title of “Proceedings of the IRE Fiftieth Anniversary, 1912-1962” , which is the entire May issue for the journal, a double-brick of a book, weighing in at 6 pounds and running over 900 pages. It is a vast and compelling survey of the history and present state and future of electronics in general, boasting an authorship of leading lights across many different fields and encompassing 250 articles. (Some of the big names include: Terman, H.A. Wheeler, H. Olson, Gordon Teal, Presper Eckert, Zworykin, Simon Ramo, JR Pierce, Watson-Watt, Jerome Wiesner, Leo Beranek, Belevitch, Colin Cherry, Lee Lusted, Ronald “THE Antenna”) King, and many others. There's fantastic reporting on the present-day state of things, as well as dozens of provocative and very prescient overview of what the future may/will bring...and take.

I obviously can't reproduce the volume, and no one seems to have the whole thing online, but I can provide a mostly-cleaned-up OCR (please pardon some of the typos) of the three very packed pages of the table of contents of the issue—many of those individual articles can be found online. (If anyone wants the original of this work, I have it for sale in my bookstore.) Perhaps now that you know such articles exist and hadn't before, you may be able to put this list to some use.

Some interesting articles include: There Will Be No Electronics Industry in 2012 A.D., J. M. Bridges; Communications Throughout the Solar System, W. H. Pickering; The Information Science anti Industry Fifty Years Hence, Robert M. Bowie; Machines with Imagination, G. A. Morton; The Integration of Man and Machine, J. Presper Eckert, Jr; Man-Machine Coupling-2012 A.D., R. M. Page...well, you get the idea.  

COMMUNICATIONS AND ELECTRONICS-2012 A.D

World Travel and Space Communication-2012 A.D., A Realistic Fantasy, Ernst Weber

• Space-2012, Lloyd V. Berknei
• Space Exploration, J. H. Dellinger
• Education in 2012 for Communication and Electronics, Frederick E. Terman
• Engineering Education-Circa 2012 A.D., W. L. Everitt
• A Day in the Life of a Student in the Year 2012 A.D., Maurice J. Ponte
• Fifty Years of Teaching Machines, Harold A. Zahl
• The Tools of the Engineer 2012 A.D., R. Bennett
• The Automatic Handbook, Nathaniel Rochester
• There Will Be No Electronics Industry in 2012 A.D., J. M. Bridges
• Radio Communication in 2012-An Obsolete Art, Dorman D. Israel
• Electromagnetics and Communications, Harold A. Wheeler
• Communication Spectra by the Wholesale-2012 A.D., Estill I. Green
• A Short History of Electromagnetic Communications, John W. Coltman
• The Spectrum Problem-Looking Back From 2012 A.D., E. A. Sack
• The Full Use of Wide-Band Communications, Sir Noel Ashbridge
• Wide-Band Communication into the Home, W. D. Lewis
• Communication and Navigation, Henri Busignies
• Communications and Electronics-2012 A.D., Peter C. Goldmark.
• Communications Throughout the Solar System, W. H. Pickering.
• Human Factors in Communications, Albert G. Hill
• Multilingual Communication, Yasujiro Niwa
• Language, Words and Symbols, Harold A. Wheeler
• Processing of Sound, Harry F. Olson

A Dehumanizing Event with the Newly-Invented Telephone (1880)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

It seems to me as though I've encountered other very unflattering introductions of the less-privileged to new inventions like the telephone along the lines of the following racist/Imperialist story. It isn't very pretty, but it is worth reading to see the extent to which denominating certain people to the vast under-under class played out even in the introduction of new technologies. This appears in Scientific American, 14 February 1880, p 98.

 

 

 

Scientific Appraisals of Curving a Baseball, 1877

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Ah, the mechanics of curving a baseball as found in the summery summertime pages of  Scientific American, August 18, 1877, page 100. The author, an "H.C.", admits that they might not be correct, but they're going with it anyway, at least at this time. 

Also I should point out that "curveball" appears in print for the first time only two years earlier, at least that is so by the Oxford ENglish Dictionary: 

• "Curveball. Baseball. A delivery in which the pitcher causes the ball to deviate from a straight path by imparting spin."
• "1875   Providence (Rhode Island) Evening Press 4 Oct.   Both sides batted heavily and by the close score made an exciting game. Macullar played worthy of a professional, and the tricky Bancker sent in his curve balls with telling effect."

And as long as we're at it, the chronology of first appearance publications of baseball-related things, according again to the OED, include the following: baseball, 1845; baseball player, 1856; baseball game, 1857; baseball bat, 1858; shirt, 1860; cap, 1865; team, 1869; diamond, 1871; glove, 1884; and baseball fan, 1885. Odd, no, that "baseball fan" appears 40 years after "baseball"? 

Glass Globes, Light, and Volcanoes (1898)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post 

I happened upon these lovely technical drawings --in plan and cross section--of the newly-patented Holophane Globe. The inventors and coiners of the Holophane were French scientist Andre Bondel and the Turkish Spiridion Psaroudak who patented their illuminating globe in the U.S. in 1896 (and five other countries between 1893-1895). It was designed with inverted and excised cuts in the glass dome to refract and reflect the interior lighting source, and successfully illuminated more area with "less light waste" than most other globes. Not only was the design effective, but the effects were also pretty, as were the schematics of the globe.  (The profile and paln remind me of some early engravings and woodcut of the interior of the Earth showing the sources of volcanic action...or in the case of our not-recently-mentioned friend Athanasius Kircher, the source of water.)

• Source: "The Holophane Glass Globes for Effecting the Better Diffusion and Distribution of Artificial Light", Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol 145, April 1898. The article is a technical review of the glass globe and wound up being highly favorable, awarding the inventors the John Scott Legacy Medal for their invention, "...for [the invention] of a globe that secures much better diffusion and more satisfactory distribution than any other globe..." 

 

The Skinniest Early Description in the USA of the Invention of Photography (1839)?

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2801

Among the earliest and lengthiest mentions of the newly-announced Daguerre invention of photography in the U.S. was "Pencil of Nature—A New Discovery"  that appeared 13 April 1839 in the Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty. There's a lot in there on the effects of what the new process might be more so than any real description of what the magical new process was. It would take several months for that to appear, and one of the first to do so, to provide some real detail on what was still a rather mysterious event and process, appeared in the National Intelligencer on 25 September 1839 (which was based on the 23 August 1839 London Globe account).

The Corsair article starts out bemoaning "progress”, in a way, setting the reader up for the next step of the democratization of art, which would meanwhile send the world of engraving (and engravers), lithography, sketchers, painters, and so on, who would all be replaced by the new invention of Daguerre.

• “We know not how it is, but just as we are going to have something good in this world, up starts a mischief to mar it or to vilify it. There is not a real panacea, but has its rival. Engraving, set upon a firm basis, one would have thought might have been supreme. No such a thing—her illegitimate sister, Lithography, sets up her claim, and by means of cheap publications, calls in the masses, who naturally prefer the inferior article; and here commences the democracy of art.”

And just like any advancement in anything—from water delivery systems in towns and cities that would replace the water-fetcher to the lineman working on some U.S.-built car being replaced by robotics, and etc.--the author sees the fate of the artisan in light of photography:

• “Here is a revolution in art; and, that we may not be behindhand in revolutions, for which we have so imitative a taste, no sooner does one start up in Paris, but we must have one in London too. And so Mr. Daguerre’s invention is instantly rivalled by Mr. Fox Talbot’s. The Dagueroscope and the Photogenic revolutions are to keep you all down, ye painters, engravers, and, alas! the harmless race, the sketchers.” --Source: Gary Ewer, http://www.daguerreotypearchive.org/texts/P8390015_PENCIL_CORSAIR_1839-04-13.pdf

It is interesting to see the variety of titles given to the earliest articles and notices of Daguerre from January through August 1839—granted for most of that time there were very few details of the process until late summer 1839 at which time the article titles became more directed and less fanciful. The following is a selection of the articles that appeared at this early stage—all of the work putting together the remarkable list of linked publications that these titles are taken from is that of Gary Ewer at the Daguerreotype Archive, here: http://www.daguerreotypearchive.org/1839.php

• "The Daguerotype" [sic]
• "Fixation of Images"
•  "Chemical and Optical Discovery"
•  "The New Art
• “Clericus”
• “Remarkable Invention”
• "Extraordinary Chemical and Optical Discovery"
• "New Discovery—Engraving, and Burnett's Cartoons."
• "Self-Operating Processes of Fine Art"
•  "Sun-Painting"
• "The Daguerrotype" [sic]
•  "Photogenic Drawings"
• "Daguerre’s Photogenic Paper, and Fixation of Images"
• "Pencil of Nature—A New Discovery"
•  "New Discovery in the Fine Arts—The Daguerroscope" [sic]
• "The Daguerrotype, or Solar Engraving"
•  "The Daguerre Secret"
• “The Pencil of Nature”

Display of Information--a Brooklyn Bridge Contribution to the "History of Lines" Series

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

It has been a while since I've added a post  to the History of Lines series, but today I've found a good one: a graphical display of the limited comings-and-goings of the cable tram on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1888.  The bridge--still not yet quite the "Brooklyn Bridge", but the "New York and Brooklyn Bridge"--was open at this point for only five years, still relatively new. and this chart shows the power expense and general time table of the small train that ran pedestrians from one end of the bridge to the other.  It wasn't a continuously moving cable train, and had regular departure times.  In any event I'm happy to display the complicated and not altogether clear display of the data associated with the train:

And the full display, with legend and explanation:

Source: G. Leverich, "The Cable Railway on the New York and Brooklyn Bridge", from American Society of Civil Engineers, Transactions, vol XVIII, March  1888, #380, pp (67)-102, plates 4-30 (25 folding plates of various aspects of the power train and fittings, complete).  

A Very Early Quantitative Scale for Classifying Smoke (1899)

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This is one of those things that you'd probably not properly think about until you had to do so--a quantitative measuring device to classify smoke (or visible emissions). In a way it reminds me of Mr. Howard who was the first to classify clouds in a scientific way in 1803--surely you'd think that the great classifiers like Aristotle & Co. would have done this over the centuries, but evidently the moving floating mountains escaped scientific classification until relatively recently. Is the same true of the cloud's distant cousin, smoke?  And what about classifying fog? I don't have the answers to this tonight as its too late to figure it out right now, but I'll return with the answers and correctly update this post. In the meantime, please find below the last part of a two-part article that appeared in the Journal of the Franklin Institute¹ in which the organization and classification of smoke by Max Ringlemann is discussed and explained. It seems as though there is a slightly earlier publication of the scale in Engineering News in 1897, though I haven't yet (again!) found the original article by Ringlemann himself.  ("In 1897 architectural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann developed smoke charts to allow observers to contextualize observable smoke into a scale of known gray. Lighter smoke indicated fewer particulates and more water, while the darkest of smoke was of grave concern. The charts were posted outside of factories, providing a very public method of environmental monitoring and awareness."--Science History Institute, https://www.sciencehistory.org/ringelmann-smoke-charts.)

It is interesting to note that a paper published by the Bureau of Mines of the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1967 employed the Ringlemann scale pretty much as we see it below.

• https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/mining/userfiles/works/pdfs/ic8333.pdf

There is also an interesting article that addresses the use of the Ringlemann scale in regards to discussion of air pollution: 

• “ Dark smoke - an introduction to air pollution control (smoke) regulations “(PDF). Hong Kong: Environment protection department, Hong Kong. Retrieved 31 August 2018.

 

Notes:

1. William H. Thorne, "The Smoke Nuisance and its Regulation...", JFI, February 1898, vol 145, pp 401-442 and pp 17-59 (same volume, different number).  

The First Mention of a Photograph of a Face? (1840)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2800

"An Account of some Experiments made in the South of Virginia on the Light of the Sun...", published in the Philosophical Magazine (London) in 1840, is a very early photographic  effort by John Draper on the effects of solar light on different material and media, including silver solutions. This is the first appearance of the work in Great Britain and Europe, having appeared in a much longer (32pp) version in the Journal of the Franklin Institute from 1837. Draper remarks that his works in photography were not much read in England, having been published in the U.S., and thought to bring this paper in particular to the attention of the Philosophical Magazine: He writes in the paper that “Most of these have been published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia; but as they do not appear to have been noticed in England, I will ask the favour of a page or two of your excellent Magazine, to give my testimony on a subject, which now appears to excite so much interest.”

Of perhaps greater interest here is the announcement in the June 1840 issue in this same volume of Draper's success in producing human portraits by the Daguerre process. It is a short notice (only five lines, appearing on page 535) and even though it is stated that the Draper paper was received on March 31st it still somehow did not make it into the May issue of the journal--this in spite of this being the first official announcement of a human portrait being made in photography. This is slightly complex because even though Draper's portrait of his sister, Dorothy, was long recognized as being the first photographic portrait, it seems as though he was beaten to the punch by Alexander Wolcott (and/or Robert Cornelius?), though it was Draper who made the announcement  of a successful portrait (in general) and thus the first overseas notice of the success. (Draper did make the first photograph of the Moon later in 1840...) 

A Very Early (First?) Description of a Panoramic Daguerreotype (1845)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Just five years after the announcement of Daguerre's invention of photography, and just four years after the beginning of the early photo craze, there appeared in the Comptes Rendus in mid-1845 a paper by Friedrich von Martens (1809-1875) on an expansive use of the new media: the panorama.  It was certainly the first paper to appear in this journal on the subject; when I checked a likely U.S. source on the subject (Journal of the Franklin Institute, 1846) I found only one mention prior to 1865: a translation of the Martens paper (recorded though as "Merteus"). This seems a little obscure but not unimportant, as Martens may have been either the second (and possibly first) to perfect a panoramic camera, patenting his "Megaskop Kamera" in 1844.

• I've decided to share the Martens paper in both the original and the American translation: 

• Here's the text version of the original article, from the Comptes rendus de l'Academie des Sciences..., Paris, June 23, 1845:

Leonardoesque Robot Brains, the Harvard Mark I, and a Peek into the Future of Computing (1944)

JF Ptak Science Books   (Expanding an earlier post from 2008)

This may well be the first popularly-written and popularly-published report on the Harvard Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) (appearing in the American Weekly, 15 October 1944), which was the first automatic, general-purpose, digital calculator.  Known as the MARK I, it was the brainchild of Howard Aiken (1900-1973), a graduate student at Harvard, who started it all in 1937 by proposing a series of coordinated Monroe calculators to function as a unified whole  that would cross the threshold of the physically-impossible calculation (though theoretically possible) to the eminently doable.  The project was immeasurably aided by the input of Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley (who had earlier dealt with the enormously problematic aspects of the scale of the universe) who put Aiken in the hands of IBM at Endicott (NY).  From there the building of the computer came under the supervision of Clair D. Lake, with the engineering and theoretical team of Francis Hamilton, Ben Durfee and Howard Aiken. 

The machine was basically completed in 1943 and tested in Endicott for the better part of the year before it was shipped of to Harvard in February 1944, where it was put almost instantly to work on ballistic calculations (like its cousin ENIAC at the Moore School at U Penn), as well as naval engineering and design issues. 

The author of this article, Gordind Bhari Lal (“noted science analyst”), actually does a pretty decent job describing the machine and its (1940’s) possibilities, noting at the end that “it may even unleash for Man’s Use the long-dreamed-of energy of the atom”.  This part did come true, especially post-war, when the machine was put to fair use by the US Atomic Energy Commission. 

The part I really don’t understand in this article is comparing the speed and function of the ASCC to two women working on calculators and Albert Einstein, working with a pencil, paper and pipe, none of whom look comfortable or happy.   Lal does make a decent comparative point (of uncertain veracity) about four generations of humans (the three above-mentioned calculators?) doing calculations that the ASCC could do in seconds.  Right or wrong, it gave the crowds in 1944 a real something to think about.

On the Annihilation of the Mind (1877)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I found an article with a captivating title and didn't know where it would take me, except that at the end we got to the point of life-and-death being somewhat in league with the conservation of energy. Anyway, the title is as you see it in the title of this quick post, “On the Annihilation of the Mind”, written by the considerable John Trowbridge, who was a professor of physics at Harvard, an E&M guy, and the major force in establishing the Jefferson Lab at Harvard. I recall that he was very prolific in addition to his teaching duties, and right about this time published several articles on the Bell telephone, which made it first appearances less than a year before this article, which published in the Popular Science Monthly in April 1877.

The last three sentence sum the article up, though I'm not exactly sure of how the author arrived at his conclusions—it bears repeating in spite of the result, if for no other reason than to share the pretty remarkable structure of the close of the article.

And so:

"The doctrine of the existence of the spirit after physical death seems to me not to be foreign to the scientific ideas of the conservation of force, which have now obtained such complete supremacy in the science of physics; or to the doctrines of Darwin, which are accepted by so large a body of eminent naturalists. Without the sun there would be an annihilation of force. When energy is dissipated, we find the sun exalting it again by processes which we cannot completely follow. The idea of a great source of life and mind, the prototype of our physical sun, which sets in motion a vast scheme for the survival of the fittest, and the exaltation of energy in vast cycles, is not inconsistent with the doctrine of the New Testament, and seems to be required in a philosophical theory which shall endeavor to account for the differences in that great spiritual world which are continually suggested to the human mind by the various types of mental growth."

A 19th-Century 3-D Printer (1864)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2799

Well, the title to this post is not quite right as we would think of it in modern terms: this one is a human-based photo-aided clay fabricator of 2-D images into 3-D, which is something. What we have here is a dedicated apparatus for making a continuous photographic 360-degree view of a subject, set in order on a revolving disc on a magic lantern and projected onto a screen with a sculptor viewing the progression and making cuts and changes to his lump of clay in response to the change of perspective. The photographs of the subject were made in a circular hall, the walls of which hosted 24 regularly-spaced cameras working in unison to make a complete photographic record of the subject. The images were then taken and arranged in order on a large disc and portrayed slowly on a screen behind which the sculptor worked his magic.

The author tells us the process came from Paris via Francois Willeme (1830-1905), who seems to have created the process in 1859 and patented it in 1860 (1864 in the U.S.), and who started a veritable "craze" for the process.

The article I'm referencing and reproducing here is from the Popular Science Review of 1864, though an earlier paper was published on the process in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in 1861. Offhandedly I've spotted several articles in the Scientific American in 1867 (including a piece of micro-photo-sculpture), plus many other papers published before 1880, so the processes wasn't obscure by any means.

In any event I found this interesting—having never seen this application before—and thought to pass it along. Plus the woodcut of the imaging room (or 3-D “scanner”) is very appealing in itself.

Mouldy Elegance (1864)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I started to call this mini-post "Beautiful Mould" but thought better of it, since moulds can cut both ways (so to speak)--"elegant" is a good descriptor and fairly correct.  In any event this image is used for the article "Moulds" and it appeared in the journal Popular Science Review, and published in 1864. Just about everything about the illustration is lovely, including the design in the display of the six samples.

Here's a detail of one of the six:

And the full plate:

From the Department of Hopes and Dreams: the Red Cross, St. John, and POWs (WWII)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2798

I assembled a little collection of WWII Red Cross and St. John charity pamphlets--what they all share is a sense unity, duty, perseverance, and hope. They are all published between 1942 and 1944, the majority coming in the summer of 1943--a wicked bad time for the Allies, perhaps the worst time since the Nazi onslaught of Europe. Five of these pamphlets directly addressed trying to help the prisoners of war held by Nazi Germany, and portrayed some healthy and sustaining images of the possibilities of POW life, as well as what would seem to be a high chance of delivery all manner of goods to the prisoners to make their time behind barbed wire somewhat more bearable. (Several of these short pamphlets are reproduced below, while the covers of four of them follow):