JF Ptak Science Books

Resistance in Czechoslovakia, 1943 (Full Reprint of Scarce Pamphlet)

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Youth of Czechoslovakia¹ was a Czech-in-exile response to the situation in the country as it stood in 1943. The situation of course was critical, and the compiler of the work, F.L. Lowidt, chronicles the state of the affairs from the end of the First World War to the occupation sometime late in 1943.  About half of the work concentrates on the war period following "the fatal policy of Munich" and the "sacrifice" of Czechoslovakia to impossibly placate Hitler.  It is a very interesting document, and as there are only a half-dozen or so located by WorldCat in libraries worldwide, I'm reproducing it here.  Of special note are the four pages or so dealing with children and the youth being used for "forced labor in Hitler's war machine", the "martyrdom of youth", and the resistance movement.  

Notes

1. LOWIDT, F.J. (compiler); artwork by W. Slosser. Youth of Czechoslovakia. Published by the Czechoslovak Youth Committee, London (and printed by Dugdale Printing, Ltd.).[1943] No date stated but WorldCat (which locates only six copies) believes it to be 1943. My copy--a Library of Congress duplicate--has a cataloguer's pencil notation for being received on 6 March 1943.  

 

The Not-Unbearable Extra-sub-Heaviness of Light (1876)

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I thought it would be interesting to share this engraving of a portable electric light apparatus. This does come very early in the modern (post 1850) sense of "electric light", but, still, even knowing of how early this is in this fiel dit is still a little shocking to see the weight of the engineering and ingenuity in providing mobile electric light.  

• "THE comparatively infrequent employment of electric light, considering the great success achieved in its production, would at first sight appear to be due to something in the application of the electricity itself. It has been repeatedly and satisfactorily proved that a continuous and powerful light can be produced by electricity, and the question naturally arises, Why is it not more frequently employed for practical purposes?"
• "For transportation of the Dynamo-electric Light Apparatus is mounted on a wagon, with steam engine, the whole weighing 4,960 lbs. The combination has proved very serviceable on account of its lightness and compactness."-- Siemens' Electric Light Apparatus. Nature 14, 133–136 (1876).

 

 

Found-Poetry in a Technical Work on Bubbles (1896)

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 "The water of those wellis sprynge vp with grete bobles."--W. Caxton tr. Myrrour of Worlde ii. xxi. sig. h4   OED

Rummaging again through the eminently-rummagable early years of Nature¹ I found a lovely little article on the physics of bubbles. The language to me seems delightful, and it comes from the first part of a very long opening paragraph of the paper:

"He has studied the behaviour of big bubbles and of little ones,

of bubbles in large and small tubes,

of bubbles of air in a liquid,

and of one liquid in another,

of bubbles in heavy land in light liquids,

of bubbles in liquids of various degrees of viscosity

and with various degrees of surface tension at their surfaces."

• [IMAGE: "THAUMATROPE for showing the formation and oscillation of drops." From C.V. Boys' Soap Bubble and the Forces Which Mold Them, 1896.]

In spite (or because of) the fact that bubbles are serious things, they are wonderfully named and as C.V. Boys points out in his fantastic Soap Bubble and the Forces Which Mold Them (1896), they are as magnificent as they are simple: "I do not suppose that there is any one in this room who has not occasionally blown a common soap-bubble, and while admiring the perfection of its form, and the marvelous brilliancy of its colours, wondered how it is that such a magnificent object can be so easily produced".

Bubbles have a long history in experimental physics² and continue to work their magic today--when I googled this title I came up with only three pages of hits, including the following, which in their own little way beg to be read:

• "Film thickness measurements in liquid–liquid slug flow "
• "Effects of Bubbles on the Hydraulic Conductivity of Porous Materials "
• "Bubble deformations and segmented flows in corrugated microchannels at large capillary numbers "
• "Bubble transport through constricted capillary tubes with application to resin transfer molding"
• "Transport of bubbles in square microchannels"
• "Step-Wise Velocity of an Air Bubble Rising in a Vertical Tube Filled with a Liquid Dispersion of Nanoparticles"

From the 1894 article:

"EVERY student of physics has observed the motion of bubbles in tubes. Which of them has not used a big bubble to show the little ones their duty in clearing out the air when filling a barometer tube? Who has not spent his time and patience in whisking a spirit thermometer to drive a bubble out of the column? Mr. Trouton has recently communicated to the Royal Society the result of some researches on this subject. He has studied the behaviour of big bubbles and of little ones, of bubbles in large and small tubes, of bubbles of air in a liquid, and of one liquid in another, of bubbles in heavy land in light liquids, of bubbles in liquids of various degrees of viscosity and with various degrees of surface tension at their surfaces. From this enumeration it is evident that the number of different magnitudes involved is very great, and at the start it seemed almost hopeless to disentangle the effects due to each. The first matter to observe was that, as in other cases of fluid motion, two cases must be distinguished. These are the cases of slow motion and of quick motion. When the motion is slow the viscosity of the liquid causes the flow to be very simple. It entirely stops all whirling and swirling, such as is seen in the water behind a boat. When the motion is quick, on the other hand, the flow is very complicated. Whirls and swirls are set up, and the resistance is increased, owing to the increased energy that has to be communicated to the whirling and swirling liquid for each centimetre that the bubble moves. The slow kind may be described as viscous flow, and the quick as turbulent flow. The most interesting point observed in connection with the turbulent flow was that it was sometimes possible to increase the rate of flow by increasing the viscosity..."

Notes:

1. "On the Motion of Bubbles in Tubes", in Nature, a Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, 8 February 1894 (vol 49 no. 1267)/ I should point out that Nature back then was almost entirely readable by almost anyone—nowadays of course it is a vastly different story; I stopped my subscription a while back when I found out that I wasn't understanding even the titles of some of the papers....

2. "I have freely made use of the published work of many distinguished men, among whom I may mention Savart, Plateau, Clerk Maxwell, Sir William Thomson, Lord Rayleigh, Mr. Chichester Bell, and Prof. Rücker. The experiments have mostly been described by them, some have been taken from journals, and I have devised or arranged a few. I am also indebted to Prof. Rücker for the use of various pieces of apparatus which had been prepared for his lectures."--C.V. Boys, Soap Bubble and the Forces Which Mold, 1896.

"Experiment for showing by intermittent light the apparently stationary drops into which a fountain is broken up by the action of a musical sound."--from the Boys book.  

"The Fine Sport" of Flying, 1893.

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I found an interesting article in Nature¹ just now,  a piece by Carl Runge on 19th century heavier-than-air human flight by the remarkable Otto Lilienthal. 

Lilienthal was an international authority on human flight, and was known to many as The Flying Man, and The Father of Flight, because, well, he flew. And he flew more often and with more recorded/documented successes in his non-powered flying machines than any other aviation pioneer of the time. In fact, he had a major influence on the Wright brothers (though not necessarily for his experimental data, which they abandoned after a while to create their own in their wind tunnel), with Wilbur Wright saying: "Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted." (From the Wikipedia article on Lilienthal.)

Lilienthal was well into making  successful jumps/flights by this time, but would suffer his fatal fall in about two more years, dying August 10, 1896, after a series of 850' flights. (I'm offering a later paper on Lilienthal, also available on ABE, from Nature for 12 December 1894.)

The last three sentences by Runge are remarkable:

"If it [flying or attempting to do so]  is taken up by a great many people, improvements of the apparatus are sure to follow, and the art of keeping one's balance in the air will be developed. Perhaps this is the road to flying. At any rate it must be fine sport."

Notes:

1. (LILIENTHAL, Otto). Runge, C. "Experiments on Flying", in Nature, a Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, 14 December 1893, volume 49 no. 1259, pp 145-168, with the Runge article on pp 157-8, with three photo illustrations of Lilienthal in flight.