JF Ptak Science Books

Electric/Electronic Brains, Part X (1948)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Here we have a lovely full-page ad from Electrical Engineering, February 1948, extolling the use of Deltabeston power cables and wiring...over a million feet (5,200 miles) of it. It was produced by GE and was covered (and layered?) with asbestos. In any event I've paid attention to electronic/electric/analog/digital/electrical/mechanical description of the human brain, either described so or pictured with gears and tubes and such. This image from 1948 is relatively late for the early period of this sort of imagery.

This is the Mark II at Harvard, also known as the Aiken Relay Calculator, and was programmed by Aiken and Grace Hopper at the beginning of operations in 1947. It followed the Mark I, the famous wartime machine (the IBM ASCC, operational 1944), and preceded the Mark III (the ADEC, operational in 1951) and Mark IV (1952). 

In Living Black & White: T.V., 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2887

I didn't expect such a good photo-essay of the Du Mont labs and assembly facilities after the very odd first few pages of the manufacturer's 1944 brochure. It started the history of the cathode ray tube at Genesis and then had a couple of pages of cartoonish timelines, but then settled into the turf and surf of their business. Well, nearly so, anyway--there were a few odd bits with the introduction of a sort of scary-looking "Alex Electron" showing how television images were made, otherwise this was an engaging assembly-line view of television manufacturing.  

It did have this gloriously colorful display, including a look at the television of the future:

It did prompt me to check out the history of the word "television" for its first and early appearances in the OED,  and there I found the following:

• 1900   Cent. Mag. June   Through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.

• 1900   Electrician 31 Sept. 822/2   At the afternoon sitting on Friday, M. C. Perskyi read a communication on ‘Television’, describing a number of apparatus based on the magnetic properties of selenium.

• 1926   Glasgow Herald 20 Dec. 11/8   Mr. John L. Baird, a native of Helensburgh,..recently invented an apparatus which makes television possible.

• 1930   J. Buckingham Matter & Radiation 122   We have heard so much about Television lately that we are apt to forget that no portion of the apparatus used is novel to scientists.
  

• 1948   N. Wiener Cybernetics 10   Television was destined to be more useful to engineering by the introduction of such new techniques than as an independent industry.

• 1957   Technology Mar. 9/2   The solution of the major problems in colour television, the public introduction of which is now more a question of economics than of technical difficulty.

A Hole in the Ground vs. a Hole in the Sky

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A while ago I wrote about a brief connection that I saw in a  photographic view of the 19' tunnel section of the Hudson River tunnel with  the 1815 stage set by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) for Mozart's Magic Flute¹. Its just the initial reaction to the perspective pulled up the Schinkel more than anything else, except maybe for a non-existent underground image from Jan Vredeman de Vries' book on perspective. That said, the set design I'm thinking of features the arrival of the Queen of the Night/Königin der Nacht, so perhaps this association isn't too meshuga...excepting the ripped-to-shreds lust for revenge that the Queen of the Night sings about, which hasn't much to do with digging a tunnel. 

 

Perhaps this is an association that can be made for any tunnel being dug and illuminated in the 19th century, as I stumbled upon another example of this association, a photograph² in another NYC tunnel--this one the tunnel under construction under the East River for the East River Gas Company, 1894. It is a little antithetical that these similarities are seen between an image of starry vault surrounding the Earth while the photos depict a lighted tube surrounded by Earth, a sort of alpha and omega of endless light...a contraction of environment filled with light compared to a contraction of the limitless night sky as seen as a theatrical set.  (I understand that there aren't a long series of lights in the tunnels, just that it looks so because of the no-doubt heavy-duty light source and its reflections on the odd surfaces/bolts/etc. the metal tubing surfaces...and that is a riff in itself.)

In any event, I like these images, and so I'll share the newest of my finds here this morning.  

"Castration vs. Vasectomy in the Feebleminded as a Surgical Problem" (1941)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2886

This is an issue that you don't hear every day...and offhand it seems to be a little late in the asking by 1941. But it wasn't too late, unfortunately, and the question was a debated one in some halls of practicing eugenic and mental health academe. This is the title to a paper¹ written by Dr. Charles C. Hawke (M.D., F.A.C.S.) while superintendent of the Kansas State Asylum in 1941, and it entailed a discussion of the efficacy of the enforced sterilization practice--a procedure under law that was basically discontinued as a medical/surgical response to mental issues in 1950 (in Kansas). 

Dr. Hawke wonders—somewhat facetiously to my reading—about the reluctance of including testicles in the field of “glandular surgery”, noting that “text books in the eugenic field” teach that “this mighty king is not to be disturbed”, along with a few other purplely examples. He quickly establishes the castration (and ovariectomy) as well as vasectomy and salpingectomy may be the way to stabilize “the unstable group” (in institutions), “be they idiot, imbecile or moron” and that the procedure should “be given serious consideration”.

He states that “the majority of our castrates will never leaves the institution. You ask—why then castrate[?]” He doesn't seem to answer this directly, but does provide some evidence (below) that the behavior of 71% those castrated and confined does improve. It is not 100%, Dr. Hawke notes, and adds the corollary “...but what surgical procedure has a 100% cure [sic]”.

There are other reports of successes in castration, including a long paragraph of Dr. (F. Hoyt) Pilcher, (Superintendent of the Kansas State Asylum for Idiotic and Imbecile Children) who began his work in the early 1890s. There is also a review of the 1917 (and 1928) laws passed by the Kansas legislature on “asexualization”. It seems that the state can uphold recommendations from medical officials recommending castration; the person in question can register a “protest” (“which are rare”). These laws extended its reach into “state penitentiaries, the boys' reformatories, state hospitals for the insane, and the state hospital for epileptics, the state home for the feebleminded and the state industrial school for girls...”

It is quite a document of those eugenical times.

Notes:

1. Charles C. Hawke (M.D., F.A.C.S., Winfield, Kansas).  Castration vs. Vasectomy in the Feebleminded as a Surgical Problem. 12 leaves (including a 17-item bibliography. Mimeographed. Stapled. GOOD+ copy. This copy's provenance: “Gift from the author, 1941” in pencil notation on the back of the first leaf, with the LC rubber stamp on the rear leaf.  WorldCat records only ONE copy (Tozzer Libray, Harvard), so as a single-issue "offprint" it is a rare thing.

2. For a deep review see: Cean T. Collins, “CHILDREN OF SORROW: A History of the Mentally Retarded in Kansas”, in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 39, No. 1 , 1965, pp. 53-78

The Towering Magnificence of the Porcupine

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post                                    

This is perhaps the greatest monument ever erected to the porcupine--of course it may be the only monument ever erected to the porcupine, but it is undeniably monumental.  This unusual image was published in Strassburg in 1604  in Joseph Boillot's (1546-1603) sumptuous New Termis Buch (first printed in 1592 as a Nouveaux pourtraits et figures de termes).  It is a bestiary of sorts, a very curious book, offering real and imaginary animals together in alabastered, marblized, memorialized, architectural form, with the  great hope of offering them to fellow engineers and builders for incorporation into the real world.  Or perhaps not, perhaps it was all just done in fun, an exercise, an experience, an artistic creation wrapped inside  the fundus of a great Baroque eyeball. 

 

The end result is the Boillot produced some extraordinary beasts, wrapping them in extraordinary garments, surrounded by other wonderful animals real and not, and elevated to extraordinary heights.  The powerful unicorn, draped with the vicious but subdued lion; the ass, regal, judicious, pensive, thoughtful, kept in place, or warm, by a dragon. Then of course there is the porcupine, absolutely magnificently appointed with spikes  kept by by dogs, supported at all levels by the creatures.

Internal Document Proposing an Organization to Establish Post-Nuclear Exchange Damage Assessment (1956)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2885

I've written many times on the technical and political end of the creation and deployment of the atomic bomb, along with some posts on the use and manipulation of language in controlling the sense impressions of nuclear war and survivability.  What I have found so extraordinary about this second part is the creation of ordinariness, or mechanization, or acceptance, of the aftermath of nuclear warfare--and what we're talking about here is the
"exchange" of not just a few 20 kiloton Hiroshima-type weapons, but thousands of megatons of explosives and massive amounts of radiation. But this is the function of familiarity, I guess--given the situation it was essential to plan for eventualities A-Z, and for that you need structure, and vocabulary. 

All things being equal, such things as an Terrestrial Afterlife in the United States needed to be contemplated because that is what we do--we make the situation possible for end-of-the-world stuff to happen, and so we have to plan for building things up again with radioactive detritus once all of the keys get turned and buttons pushed, as  it is just a natural course of that historical river. That the bomb would be built was a given; that the Soviets would develop the a bomb and delivery capacities was just a matter of time, and that they would be our sworn death-enemies was also a fait accompli. To develop a way to somehow survive a nuclear war may have been a major deterrent to not launching an attack, especially when linked with a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) arms build up (where everyone and everything would be obliterated if there was a nuclear war, or at least so by 1965 (and probably earlier than that). All this insane stuff may have worked, and somehow we managed not to ignite the world, because (to paraphrase Frank Zappa) there would be no real estate left.

On the other hand, building all of these weapon systems and planning for attack and the post attack world could have pushed us into a final confrontation, making all of this sound "winable", "doable" somehow, that once the bombs had all exploded and nothing worked anymore, that there would be enough to pull together of our civilization to declare that we had indeed "won'". 

And the only way to declare a winner was to have something to stand on besides pieces of green glass and Earth, and so  plans for communications and a military, police force, fire brigades, medical care, food distribution, banking, and all the rest--the pieces of a recognizable backbone of American society--would have to be undertaken.  All of this could very well accomplish the creation of an illusion in the mind of the adversary that you are capable of surviving a nuclear war, and so there would be no great gain in attacking; or it could send the message that by doing this preparation that you were preparing a first strike scenario, and so the adversary would attack while the odds were still not horribly out of balance.  And on and--it all looks like a lose-lose endgame to me, which is hardly a "game" at all when all players are losers.

But still there was a need to staff the thousands of positions that went into the theoretical end of figuring out the non-weapon-end world after nuclear war, and the above "position description" is an example of that, a necessarily pro forma form, just another job in a ea of jobs.  This one's job descriptions read like any other, except of course that the content was much different.  Form the same, sentence structure the same, vocabulary basically invariable. 

One aspect of this planning for the Afterlife was the planning part itself, planning to plan, how to make sense of the answers and the questions, a form into which the parts of a process are poured before they become the process itself.

A Note on Graphical Display and a Mechanical Heart, 1876

JF Ptak Science Books  (Expanded version of an earlier post)

This quick note comes as the result of a short chase on the detection of the pulse and the ability to determine death--as far back and even before Pliny life was determined by the audible heartbeat, which is where the trouble began, because one can still be very alive with a faint heartbeat. This was a major concern when dealing with folks who were thought to have expired, because in the mid-19th century and before the instruments necessary to make a careful and accurate appraisal of whether the heart was still working were yet finely developed.  Laennec's stethoscope appeared around 1816, but as much of an improvement as it was this instrument awaited considerable refinements before a truly solid identification of a non-working heart could be established. The gaps in the determination of the arrival of death led to mortuaries where the supposed-dead were left to themselves at room temperature for three days, awaiting the ultimate determination of death which was putrefaction (as in the Munich and Frankfurt Leichenhaus and the Vienna  Zentralfriedhof). Earlier in the history of the determination of death methods were quicker and more brutal (if the patient was still alive) involving bellows-driven tobacco-smoke enema,  as well as tongue pulling and nipple twisting. 

 

This led to Etienne Marey (1830-1904), a versatile experimenter and premier instrumentalist who was a scientist, physiologist, and motion-picture/chronographer pioneer, who in the 1880's created what was essentially the world's first moving-photographic "slow motion" device. One iteration of Marey's apparatus was basically a long series of ganged cameras recording a motion for a  simple task at a given time frame and presented on a continuous strip of photographic paper, sort of like a motion picture with the camera speed set at three frames per second. The resulting images were phenomenal and showed people for the first time the exactness of all manners of simple motions--motions that no longer looked so "simple" once all of its aspects could be studied from captured photographic evidence.  Even the act of hopping over a small stool or bending to pick up a bucket of water were enormously revealing in a way like Robert Hooke's Micrographia displayed the great detail and complexity of the seemingly simple fly.

Aside from being one of the founders of cinematography, the other aspect of Marey's interest in capturing and manipulating time was in medicine, where by the time this article of interest in this post was published in 1876 he had already established himself as one of the greatest cardiovascular physiologists.  What we find in this review in Nature (Thursday, January 6, 1876) of Marey's Physiologie Experimentale  (Paris, 1876) was the editor's keen interest in the mechanical heart Marey had constructed to show the actions and functions of the heart--the first time, the article notes, that all aspects of the action of the heart were exhibited correctly in one model. 

  Of particular interest was the recording device for the pulse of the heart, which was one in a series of devices such as that improved upon, something Marey himself had done with the first-introduced sphygmograph ("pulse wrtier") of Karl von Vierdodt in 1854.  The 1875/6 Marey instrument made major advancements in continuous graphical registration in instruments of continuous noninvasive arterial responses.

The Biggest Big Wheels (1896)

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Even Scientific American--the 1896 source of this small article on this big bike--was impressed with the virtuoso nature of bigness in this invention, stating in the open paragraph that "in this age of big things one is always prepared for the construction of a mammoth engines, ships, buildings..." but this practice was "invaded by the bicycle world". The trike was "colossal--no other word can describer it--" at 17' long, powered by eight people (four per rear wheel), with a 6'-diameter front wheel and 11'-diameter (!) rear wheels (with 1/2-inch diameter spokes)  and weighed in at 3000 pounds. It was a beast. The function evidently did not follow form, as there was no discernible use for it except to be displayed during parades and other social events. 

Fiction vs. Fact--on the Vastnesses of Creation (1870)

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 “When, at the very outset of our studies, we cast a 
glance upon creation, we are astonished at its 
vastness, and we  see that none of our fictions 
attains the sublimity of its  proportions." 

This is the opening salvo from the first 
section of this delightful little book by 
Felix-Archimede Pouchet (1800-1872),
The Universe: or, the Infnitely Great
 and the Infinitely Little, which was 
published by Scribners in 1870.
 

A Sociological Map Made for and by Hoboes (1870)

JF Ptak Science Books   (An earlier post, expanded)

This is the frontispiece to the delightful work with the luscious title of The Slang Dictionary; or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases and Fast Expression of High and Low Society… printed in London by John Camden Hotten, in 1870.  It is a hobo or “cadger” (“a  mean or vulgar fellow who would rather live on other people than work for himself”)  map (or the map of “a tribe of vagabonds”) of Maidstone, in Kent, drawn by a “screever” (a sidewalk chalk artist who normally would draw religious images for money), and showing the various chalked and etched signs that the hoboes (“and other mendicant marks”)  would leave for one another, being a key to the town, for what was practicable, safe, dangerous, and the like.

Recorded antiquarian hobo and tramp symbols like these are really quite rare, given their ephemeral nature to begin with; of course the need to record these obscure signs by polite society was not on a high order.  There are many indications that signs such as these existed, but not many illustrations.  For example in the book The Triumph of Wit; or, Ingenuity Display'd in its Perfection, edited by John Shirley. (1724), as well as works by Holyland and Borrow there is a description of English gypsies and their travels, and a short description of their use of boughs and sticks, set out for each other, so that a duplication of effort by different bands or families would not occur.

(The figure of the woman, wonderfully named “3/4 Sarah”, probably connects this Sarah to a sort of popular dance.)

Hotten also published the following interesting and title-bending work in 1874:  THE ORIGINAL LISTS OF PERSONS OF QUALITY;  EMIGRANTS; RELIGIOUS EXILES; POLITICAL REBELS; SERVING MEN SOLD FOR A TERM OF YEARS; APPRENTICES; CHILDREN STOLEN; MAIDES PRESSED; AND OTHERS WHO WENT FROM GREAT BRITAIN TO THE  AMERICAN PLANTATIONS 1600-1700, WITH THEIR AGES, THE LOCALITIES WHERE THEY FORMERLY LIVED IN THE MOTHER COUNTRY, THE NAMES OF THE SHIPS IN WHICH THEY EMBARKED, AND OTHER INTERESTING PARTICULARS.

"Why Bother About the Government?" (1932)

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Katherine Pollack's 1932 Why Bother About the Government, the third installment of the Leftist Brookwood¹ Labor College pamphlet series, is a bit of a Socratic polemic about the problems and advantages of government, owners of the means of production, workers, and labor organizers...coming down firmly in the square of very-pro forces of organized labor.

Offhand I am not finding anything about Katherine (Heilprin) Pollack², though there is quite a bit about Brookwood (see below for an intro) and its captain, A.J. Muste.

Also I can't find much about the cartoonist whose work attracted me to this pamphlet to begin with, Herbert Heasley, though his work has a certain 1930's feel to it.  I've included his three drawings, below. 

A Glimpse of a Small Part of the Big Lie, Soviet Style (June 1945)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2884

There's nothing quite like a series of lies that is a vast series of lines, lies all the way up and mostly all the way down, lies that are built into Borgesian extravagancies with a sweetener here and there of a little bit of truth. That is pretty much what we have here in the pro-Stalinist/Soviet pamphlet, What is Happening in Poland, with an imprint of June, 1945.

There's a lot of difficulty in this work's 29 pages, all of which are ultimately directed against the still-extant Polish government in exile (in London) insisting that those are the anti-democratic and anti-Soviet forces at work in Poland. The write, a physicist named Ignace Zlotowski is the author, and he makes an abundant case for the London government setting out to destabilize (and de-Stalinize) the “New Poland”.

The rhetoric is really quite remarkable.

For example, Zlotowski makes the case for the catastrophic defeat of the Polish underground in the Warsaw Uprising (1 August—2 October 1944) directly on the Polish exile leadership. Even though far away in London the government did exert considerable influence in Poland, and did organize and begin the uprising. The rest of the story and the failure of the uprising against the Nazis can be placed in squarely in the lap of the Soviets, who—even though at the gates of the city, advancing West—did nothing in this fight against the German army. The Soviet forces sat just across the Vistula, ignoring pleas from Churchill and Roosevelt to help the Poles, and waited the tragedy out, until the Germans destroyed the uprising in bitter house-by-house fighting, ultimately destroying nearly the entire city, killing some 200,000 people (mostly civilian, and mostly murdered). The Wehrmacht pushed through the city from October to January, hunting people, destroying the city almost completely. It was a strategic move by Stalin, deciding to let two enemies fight it out, allowing the Nazis to destroy elements of the population that the Soviets found to be problematic for the administration of the country once they decided to push through Poland on their way west.

This was standard procedure for the Soviets—for example, there was the Katyn massacre, where 22,000 Polish military officers, police, and intelligentsia were executed in various parts of the Katyn forest. The Great Terror, the Great Famine, the Show Trials, the Holodomor, the Pogroms, and on and on. This was what the Polish government in exile was fighting against, and this is what they would lose to.

This pamphlet displays just a little of that Stalinist thinking, and it is enough to understand what those people were up to.

I've included (below) some of the text related to the Warsaw Uprising and the Trial of the Sixteen--we don't have the results of the trial though they are pre-ordained, as is the fate of the fabled and heroic General Okulicki, who would be found guilty and then murdered by the NKVD in 1946. 

 

Public Humor Displayed: London Signboards (1866)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2883

What is the first stop for looking at—hold on to your seat!--socio-descriptive stationary public humor? I do not know, though I have found an example of the history of such a thing in a book written by the author of which I wrote about on this blog earlier (in post 2882) named John Camden Hotten, who contributed a fine effort in the history of cant and slang. All I'm really talking about here are intentionally funny signs, advertisements and store/shop/business signs that identify what goods/services are offered, or the name of an establishment, that sort, but in there is another story of humor and sarcasm in the display of the name—sometimes it is the name itself but it seems mostly that the funny part of it all are the parable-like qualities of the elements that visualize the name. Hotten's contribution to this genre of humor is a wonderful catalog called The History of Signboards, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1866), which is, at it states, a history of advertising and shop signs, some of which are lovely, some are bizarre, many are funny,  all of which make this book an irresistible browse.

Here are a few examples of the legends of such signs:

Barber:

“I devote my razors to all faces,
And defy the criticism of faithful mirrors.”

Public Houses:

“You gentlemen, and yeomen good,

Come in and drink with Robin Hood.

If Robin Hood be not at home,Come in and drink with Little John.”

 

And:

“Your head cool,Your feet warm,

But a glass of good gin Would do you no harm.”

An inn:

“Stay, Traveller, a while and view

One that has travelled more than you,

Quite round the Globe in each Degree,

Anson and I have plow’d the Sea;

Torrid and Frigid Zones have pass’d,

And safe ashore arriv’d at last.I

n Ease and Dignity appear He—in the House of Lords, I—here.”

Hotten has hundreds and hundreds of examples, and he tells the story in an odd manner, with a lilt of an 18th century antiquarian more so than a Victorian. Here's the link for the full text with illustrations available at Project Gutenberg, and I do recommend even just a quick browse, as there is only so much I can do in a one-hour post like this. 

• Source: Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45249/45249-h/45249-h.htm

A Little Sturm und Drang in a Piece of U-Boote 977 Ephemera (1945)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2882

Here's a short tale of surprise and of some disappointment. First, the pamphlet pictured here is a standard work (Der Signalgast, Handbuch fuer Signalkunde, fifth edition, 1935) on naval communications using Morse code and flags. It seems to have been standard issue in Germany through the early 1930's through WWII. It must've been quite popular because there are a number of these for sale around the web in the $10-$50 range, more towards the ten dollar range than not.

This copy is different because it has the Office of Naval Intelligence paperwork of having been removed and secured from the German submarine U-977, captured/surrendered at the port of Mar del Plata, in Argentina, 17 August 1945. U-977 has a provocative history after the war, making a 108-day voyage from Norway to Argentina in the supposed hopes of being able to surrender in peace. There are a number of rumor/tales/conspiracy theories offering other explanations for this long and time-consuming voyage, including transporting Hitler or his remains to Argentina, or carrying stuff of great value, or transporting leading Nazi figures, or some such. There are many stories about the U-977 voyage spread around the web—including one of legend that the boat traveled for 66 consecutive days submerged--though for my reading (and I know very little about these matters) the boat's last captain, Heniz Schaeffer, who wrote a book about the adventure and which was published in 1952 had nothing to say about a number of the high-flying (sorry) tales of intrigue.

It is interesting to me though that the pamphlet was on the submarine, and seems to have been pretty heavily used, which gives all of it together a secondary ephemeral life. The ONI paperwork is pretty straight forward; there was some secondary paperwork that was more mysterious to me, and was not readily readable as it is in Fraktur, which is hardly an alphabet basking in obviousness. Anyway once the script was punched through, all this attractive printed note was was an invoice for some sort of food loaded onto the sub on 24 April 1942. “Delivery note” is the heading from the Marine-Verpflegungsamt (Marine Catering Office), with someone signing off on having received some amount of unsalted something-or-other in the first quarter of 1942.

It was a little deflating as I built the thing up in my head a little, not being able to read the script offhand. Anyway, there it is.

The pamphlet does have one more mysterious piece to it—there are some notations on the title page made in German script (which is basically undecipherable to me), and I don't know yet if it is just a few words or (hopefully) the owner's name. I'll have to get back to you on that. For the time being, enjoyment will have to be found in the fact that this book spent two years on a German sub, then made an enormous journey across the Atlantic at the end of the war, then made its way to Washington DC (where I bought it), and now is temporarily in western North Carolina. It has one more trip to make after the title page annotations get figured out, and that may be the last trip that the pamphlet makes.

As it turns out the date on the food invoice predates by a couple of months the date on which the U-977 was laid down, so there's that.

Finally, the U-977 was escorted north to New London, Connecticut, and then used for target practice and sunk off Cape Cod on 13 November 1946. The U-977 never lost a man and never sank a ship.

 

Some references:

http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-977A/U-977INT.htm

http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-977A/U-977Photos.htm

“The U-977, one of the most interesting Kriegsmarine ships in history...” https://www.mhistory.net/the-last-mission-of-u-977-cruise-across-the-atlantic-and-hitlers-alleged-evacuation/

On the Souls of Toys (1892)

JF Ptak Science Books  (Expanded earlier post)

Fact:  toys have souls.  Or, if we can establish that in this case a "fact" can be so identified, then a "fact" this must be.

I've stumbled onto a remarkable short story in Punch's Almanack for 1892 (as part of Punch, or the London Charivari) called "The Evolution of a Toy Soul, or Nursery Karma".  This piece establishes that toys have souls, that they have an inner, thinking, emotional existence which is capable of Karma and reincarnation, a life of their own--lives of their own. Cognizant, penetrative, analytical.  And a toy.

The story is told partially in the first person, in the voice of a toy who recounts its long series of births and rebirths--eleven (so far) in all--and its (his or her's) long experiences.  And this all more than a hundred years before Toy Story.  I don't know this literature very well, not really, but so far I have not found other "toys have souls" stories, nor have I been able to find out anything about this particular toy story, with searches done in JSTOR and Google and a host of other repositories turning up nothing at all.  Its a puzzling thing, really, because it is a wonderful story.

In a brief summary, our toy soul starts out it life ("my first birth") as a rubber ball ("the body in which I first became conscious of my existence").  The toy soul figures too that it must be its first body, because there is no lower entry point in toydom, except, as is noted, for a brick, which happens to be not-really-a-toy. 

"My Second Birth" find the toy soul returned to the nursery as a Ninepin, a Ninepin King, who lives part of its life in the hands of a ("quite mad") human child who dresses the Ninepin in dolls clothes and fabric.

"My Third Birth":  "the law of Karma has mysteries which are hid even from the initiated, and I am still at a loss to explain how it came about that I was next incorporated in an Organ Top", which was basically a spinning top that produced a melody of some sort.

"My Fourth Birth":  "I was advanced at a bound" in Karmic hierarchy by being held in the form of a fur monkey with bead teeth and glass eyes.  Here our toy soul has a recollection of its earlier self as a musical top, as it leaves with the monkey a "chronic melancholy", who takes care (as it were) of a sick girl for a long period of time, and then in the end is given over to a careless boy, and ends up burning in a fireplace.