JF Ptak Science Books

"Telephone" Calls from Tomorrowland--or, Weighing Antique Surprise

JF Ptak Science Books    (An episode in the series on the History of Anticipation.)

This ad appeared only 66 years ago in 1954--that's four generations in dog years, two human generations (or one for the more later-in-life crew, which is appealing as I knew a man whose grandfather was born in the 18th century), and 15 generations in managing data and communications. Perhaps more.  It is difficult to imagine the intense surprise that attended this ad showing a practical and popular adaptation of a communications breakthrough. 

The electromagnetic telegraph, which is arguably the first electrically-powered iteration of the internet, was in the works from the 1820's until it was nailed by Samuel Morse in 1837.  It was 40 years to the development of the Bell telephone (another dramatic example of an invention/technological idea/breakthrough that was "in the wind", a popular undiagnosed monumental meme, some decades in the making in the hands of Bell and Reiss and Meucci and Gray and even Edison). Two more decades (just past the turn of the century) until more-widespread wireless telegraphy, another two decades after that (1920's) for popular radio, and another two decades after that (post WWII/1950's) for popular television broadcasting. 120 years between the patented invention of the Morse telegraph to 50 million Americans with televisions in 1955. 

The "telephone" of 2020 is as removed as the telephone of 1954 as the telephone of 1954 was removed from the electromagnetic telegraph--we're not meeting half-way in the meeting of improbable impossible worlds, of worlds of the future unimagined in the past.  That is what comes to mind when I see this add for the speaking telephone in 1954--the astounding, astonishing, speaking telephone, the phone that allowed you to not have the receiver to the ear, that allowed you to do free-hand work and communicate at the same time.  It was an ambitious improvement, and as soon as the phone appeared, it became a standard of necessity if that necessity was within budget. 

It is the weight of surprise that is so abundant looking at pictures like this, giving us the opportunity to imagine the surprise elements of another time. It may well be that the new 1954 user of the speakerphone would have looked at the first telephone systems of 1894 as we look on that 1954 telephone today.  Probably not so, though, probably it was much more imaginable to have foreseen the 1954 possibilities in 1894 than for 1954 to have seen in the same amount of time to 2013:  the technological pieces necessary for part of that imagination had not yet been invented, the science ahead of the sci fi.

The other part of this surprise element is that 1954 is well within living memory, and that this combination of technology and physics and mathematics has grown so incredibly from the speakerphone to the massive changes in 2013--it is as surprising to imagine this as to imagine the same scenario for what happened a year before in biology:  it is difficult to grasp the  sweeping changes in that field from the identification of DNA in 1953  and how far those fields have come since. 

I think that if one could quantify this sort of "surprise" that the greatest amount of "Surprise Integers" (or whatever) ever recorded would have taken place within these past 50 or 60 years. Which makes me wonder--will people 66 years hence see the pictures of our fabulous accomplishments in 2020 as quaint reminders of how much things changed between 2020 and 2086?  Will those "Surprise Integers" be as great for that period of time as the ("our") preceding period with concomitant revolutions in thought?  My guess is "yes"--it's just hard to imagine. 

A Note on Reverseness--Time

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I was working on a paper by H.C.Corben on time dilation ("Time Dilation Effects in Space Travel" 1959) and the clock paradox and thought about just time moving backwards, in whole or in part, and went poking around the edges of things a little bit to see a few examples in the arts.  

One story--or a piece of one story--is  in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969), where we are introduced to backwards WWII narratives of B-17's getting bullets sucked out of them by Germans while going in to retrieve their bombs to return to base. Martin Amis' Time's Arrow (1991) is another good one, though the end result was very troubling, where a doctor brings people back to life through his life though we are disgusted to see how much life he “gives back” as a medical doctor at Auschwitz. There's Philip K. Dick , Counter-Clock World (1967) , with the charming idea of “old-birthing” in the grave and emerging from wood and dirt (don't know about cremation); Fitzgerald's Benjamin Button (1922) in which only one character lives in a reverse chronology; WR Burnett’s Goodbye to the Past (1934), which is a standard story except that it moves continually from 1929 to 1873; and Iain Banks' Use of Weapons (1991) which tells one story going forwards and the other backwards, together. Remember, this is just a little taste of the literature, a ramble. 

A few examples from the stage: George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s play, Merrily We Roll Along ( 1934 ), which is a narrative told in reverse order. Here's an interesting theatre example: Harold Pinter's Betrayal and Seinfeld's “The Betrayal” episode, in which the later pays homage to the former, maybe, going so far as to name a principal character in the story “Pinter”--no doubt this is toxic to post-structuralists. 

In cinema, Jean Epstein ‘s The Three Sided Mirror (1927) features a sequence where the events happen in reverse, while more modern examples include Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, 1997), Christopher Nolan (Memento, 2000),  Jean-Luc Godard’s short (From the Origin of the 21st Century for Me, 2000), and many others.

Then there's the not-quite reverse storytelling line of the nonlinear story, which can go back and forth, or partially this or that, in movies like Citizen Kane (1941), Once Upon a Time in the West (1984), and Gance's Napolean (1927); and in books like Ulysses (1922), Finnegan's Wake (1939), and Flann O'Brien At Swim Two Birds, and many many others. It seems this category (and anachronism and parachronism) are much larger than the reverse time story, and seems to be initiated a little earlier as well.

I'm not going anywhere with this one, just making notes...

The Normandie That Failed (1942)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2905

Breezing through a volume of Popular Mechanic for 1942 I came across an article on refitting the French ocean liner, the Normandie.  The only thing I knew about her was that the ship was the subject of one of the all-time great travel posters (pictured below). The imagery for February 1942 was vastly different. It turns out that when the general war began in Europe the Normandie was in NYC harbor where it was more or less immediately interned. As a matter of fact after just a short while this great ship was tied up next to the RMS Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, which meant the world's three largest ocean liners were cheek and jowl to one another in NYC.  After Pearl Harbor the ship was put under the command of the U.S. Coast Guard, and after a very brief period the command was transferred to the USN. That's where these plans come in, to re-purpose the ship into an aircraft carrier:

But that was not to be and construction plans were made to transform the ship into a troop transport

Then came the Great Misfortune.  In February 1942--the month that this Popular Mechanics was issued--the Normandie (renamed the USS Lafayette) caught fire, flamed out, capsized, and died. There was some amount of rumor and innuendo that the ship was sunk as a result of foreign intrigue, but a board of inquiry found otherwise.¹ It seems that in the course of refitting that a blow ironically and tragically set on fire a pile of life preservers that were made of very buoyant by highly flammable fibre from the great kapok tree. The very effective fire suppressor was disengaged after the French sailors were led off, and, well, seemingly a lot of other unfortunate things played into one another to the critical result. It was a fatal fire for the ship. I recall seeing very unsettling pictures of the Normandie in LIFE magazine, capsized in shallow water and winter ice mud.

 There were efforts to revive her, retrieve her, bring the great ship back to life in one way or another, but all attempts failed, and the Normandie was sold for scrap in 1946 and was completely gone by 1948.

Notes.

1. "The investigation found evidence of carelessness, rule violations, lack of coordination between the various parties on board, lack of clear command structure during the fire, and a hasty, poorly-planned conversion effort."--Wikipedia

Zed + Zero Zeppelins = No Zeppelins at All (1913).

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I knew I needed to do something with this tremendous image (found as you can see in Scientific American for 16 August 1913) and thought it might be nice to make something of it rhyming "zeppelin" all the way through...but there aren't very many single words that do that, though if you cheat a little you can have a lot of two-word constructions with the second word being "in" that would close the gap. Anyway, that's not all that fruitful or interesting, so I'm just going to note that this composite image depicts Zepps on their way to be zero and zed following their zigs and zags through the sky. It is an attempt--I think--to show that in spite of their tremendous size and threatening nature, the Zeppelins could break just like everything else.  

An Educated Fly--Scientific American, 1898

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How could you see an article heading of "An Educated Fly" and not share the secret?  I don't know, and so I am performing a bit of due diligence, sharing the story from Scientific American from 3 September 1898. There really isn't that much to tell, and the title is probably better than the story: the large tablet is placed on a stage in front of an audience, with a pitchman telling some sort of warm-up story to create interest among the crowd; a fly of some sort (whether a model or a real fly pinned or tied to something, I don't know) and placed on a little shelf beneath the board. The ringmaster would ask a question, and the fly move around and alight or somehow make it known as to its selection of the numbers/letters on the grid. The trick is revealed in the image below--after the blackboard on its pedestal is shown to the audience front-and-back, it is positioned over a trap door on the stage, where a confederate would rise up and position themselves inside the pedestal and operate the device holding the live/inanimate fly. That's it. After the tricks were performed, the inside man would escape through the trap door, the pedestal would be wheeled out to display that it was empty, and that was that. Old trick, new fly. 

Is This the First Mention of the Word “Cybersex”?

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2888

At first it appeared that this was indeed the first appearance of “cybersex” (in 1970), and that it pre-dated the established conception of its first appearance by twenty years. But, well: no. After much ado, and after some very subdued and annoyed half-bored/boring interest, it turns out that this is a reprint of an article that appeared in 1967, three years previously.

“Science Fiction—Sex for Ever—a New Cybernetic Project Called Interfuck” is the in-your-face uncertain “title” of the article under consideration here, and it seems to be bouncing its little four-page self around without attribution. Its weirdness caught my eye, and I quickly zeroed-in on the unexpected word, “cybersex”. Now, there's a LOT of speculation going on in this short article about how all of that person-to-person-to-machine loop happens, and I have no interest in going through it—you can certainly read it for yourself, though, as I've scanned the thing and attached it below.

The article appears in a badly-titled booklet by O.D. Wells, How Could You be So Naive!, published by Artorga and distributed by Modern Books Limited, Berkshire. There are six other papers/articles in this issue in addition to the Wells, including mostly serious stuff: H. Maturan, “Neurophysiology of Cognition”; David Redman “Processing Information with Light”; Roland Fischer, “The Perception-Hallucination Continuum”; J.L. Synge (?!) “A Plea for Chronometry”' A. Battersby, How to Bury and Idea”; and the our problem, “Science Fiction—Sex for Ever—a New Cybernetic Project Called Interfuck [sic]”...plus a foreword by F.H. George.

The course of the article wasn't so obvious because it seemed that this was a bit of a sci-fi story wrapped around a parody and tied up with short anxieties, and the references in the article weren't accurate, and perhaps not real. Also the publisher, Artorga, is enigmatic, and sometimes to me seems to not take itself seriously even though there are some very serious contributors. There weren't that many places to turn to check this piece out after the first obvious choices proved to go nowhere.

It is difficult to find out anything about Artorga (“Artificial Organism”), though the “Paragram” of this work cites heavy hitters Gordon Pask, Ehinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, and Stafford Beer as being “the Committee of Artorga” establishing it in 1958.

Anyway, “cybersex” as a word hunt was enough for me, and the earliest uses of the word were given as 1991 (Oxford English Dictionary), 1990 (Merriam-Webster), and then a myriad of other minor notes (almost all unreferenced) for the period 1985-1990. This example of course has them all beat, and by a wide margin.

It also predates just about all of the other “cyber-” created words prefixed to a wide variety of nouns, including a number of words that are slightly more removed than “cybersex”. There's “cyber-porn” from 1989; -romance, 1992; -smut, 1993; -friend, 1986; and -affair, 1994, for example. The only references I can find for earlier “cyber” prefixes are “cyberkid” which I've never encountered (1966); “cyberman”, which evidently has something to do with Dr. Who and also from 1966; and “cybertron”, as a sort of computer hardware reference, from 1961. All of this flows from the first introduction of “cyber” in its creation by Norbert Wiener (a very smart guy who also happened to control greatly to the US war effort in WWII with fire-control in AA weapons derived from his famous “Yellow Peril” book) in his work Cybernetics (1948). Oh yes--”cyberneticist” and “cybernetician” appear in 1948 and 1950.

Found-Abstract Art and the Coming of the NCC-1701: the Capazza Lenticular Airship, 1909

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Here's another early aviation post, as I seem to be a little stuck this morning in the 1908-1911 period...or suitably enough down a small rabbit hole to keep me from doing my mailing duties.  This is a fascinating period with tremendous steps forward in technology taking place just five years after the first successful Wright powered flight test--it is hard to imagine the Wrights were roundly ridiculed in their efforts and worked for the most part in deep privacy; and yet here, just 1500 days or so later, there are hundreds of aeronauts and a dozen or so journals devoted to tech aspects of flight.

What caught my Star Trekian eye here in this May 1908 article in l'Aerophile was the lovely found-abstract plans for supporting the envelope of Louis Capazza's lenticular airship, a composite balloon/aircraft. The firm of Adolphe Bayard-Clement was the planned producer of the airship (they were the first to go into general production of an airplane, the Santos-Dumont Demoiselle 19) though it never was built. It was certainly intriguing--it was lighter than air, non-symmetrical, top be powered by three 120 hp engines supplying power to three screws fore and aft--it was lovely in its way, and of course given it plan and profile immediately suggests to me the Starship Enterprise, though I may be alone in that.  

And here's the Found-Abstract art end of the deal--the structure for the non-symmetrical support for the balloon/plane envelope:

Tech info (and image source, above) see Berget, Conquest of the Air, 1909, pp 183-186. 

Images sources (below):  https://archive.org/details/larophile16besa/page/182

Robot-Art of the Future and Far-Sighted Art of the Past

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2813

[Johannes Reuchlin, Augenspiegel...1511]

What happened to art in the period before Impressionism that was made by people who needed glasses and didn't or couldn't wear them?  The answer is obvious because, I think, nothing quite like that exists in galleries or public collections:  people who painted but had poor vision were probably/simply told that they couldn't paint.  If a far-sighted person without corrective specs attempted to paint a sunset over a forest, and painted it exactly  as they saw it, and were doing this in 1787, there work undoubtedly would have been rejected as utterly failing in realism.  On the other hand, the result of their work may have been beautiful collections of forms and colors capturing the essence of the forest and the sunset, but they would have been 50 years shy of the JMW Turner time, and 70 years or whatever shy of the Impressionists.  

A person with poor or disturbed vision who tried to paint during this time would have been roundly scooted out of the palace of correct painting, though they could have been inspirations to generations of Barnett Newmans and Jasper Johns and Clyfford Stills and Wassily Kandinskys.

All this said, does something like Edvard Munch's The Voice (1893) start to look a little "different" if you imagine a far-sighted artist at work without their glasses?

Or a vision-impaired person producing Les Alpilles (1890) instead of a visionary Van Gogh?

Or a macular degenerating issue producing a painting like Georgia Okeefe's Light Coming on the Plains III (1917)?

 

Or a half-blind artist painting Matisse's The Open Window, Collioure (1905), simply painting exactly what they saw?  

I don't think of revolutionary artworks in terms of their common ophthalmologic varieties--I just wanted to make a point about what happened to all of that artwork that was no doubt produced by people with impaired vision before the Impressionists and Fauves and non-representational artists came into being.  I wonder if those who received J.M.W. Turner (as with, say, Rain, Steam, Speed--the Great Western Railway, 1844) so badly so early on in his career and so early in the History of Disappearing Details wondered whether he had a visual issue, or not? 

And in a way, similar to the probably non-existent vision-challenged art of the past is the Robot art of the future--or at least the robot art of what was described by P.K. Hoenich in his article "Robot-Art, the Hopeful Monster" that appeared in two part in the unlikely journal Cybernetica in 1963 and 1964.  It was with high hopes that I started reading this article wanting the author to address robots-making-art in the future.  After all, my friend George Widener, who is a fabulously gifted artist,  directs some of his fantastically involved calculating/numerical artworks to the interests of his robot-collectors of the future--given this case, why (if the robots are collecting) wouldn't they also produce art themselves?  And why, if given the legions and multitudes of robots of the future couldn't they produce every recorded piece of art that has ever existed and then insinuate development and trends and institution and all of the other gifts of the singularity and produce all of the works of art that will ever be produced?

Well, Hoenich turns out to be describing "robots" of a very different sort, whether he uses the term "monster" in his title or not.  He was broadly addressing a style of art that is produced by externally-controlled structures (mostly), and his particular brand was a mobile-like device with art bits whose movement was powered by the wind...and also used found spectra and sunlight.  It was not what I was hoping for, the vision of robots-at-the-easels/keyboard/whatever remaining unfulfilled. 

Still it was an interesting read, mostly in laying Hoenich in a continuum of similar artists whose "robots" were the wind (as for example with a Calder) or Nicolas Schoeffer (with spectacular luminodynamics) or Mohly-Nagy (with a combo of light and movement) or Arp (with chance painting) and maybe even Pollock. I guess even Duchamp could be included in a category like this if you considered his work to be governed by selective, found chance, a sort of choice-chance, for his Readymades. 

So in a way these artworks were made by "robots" insofar as they were produced by not-exactly the artist but with external assistance.

"Squinting with Art" perhaps could have been the title of this post--squinting at your landscape to see it with semi-non-representational vision, and squinting at the titles of other works to make their possibility more appealing to what you 'd like to see. 

A Map of Japanese Intentions for Conquest Extending to Hawaii--1933

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2812

I do not unfortunately have much information on this very interesting (and to me unexpected) map, nor do I know very much about the history of Japanese militarism and planning 1925-1935--I do though want to at least post/share it for interested parties. As you can see, the expected sphere of influence to be maintained by the Japanese in the near future extended to Pearl Harbor, Manchuria, and as far south as the northern Celebes.  What is remarkable is that this map was published no later than 1933. If you read the text of the pamphlet (below) you will note that was seen that Japan planned on world domination ten years hence (ca. 1943). The map:

A Plan of Japan's Proposed Military and Naval Conquest as Revealed in the Strategic Map appears no later than 1933. The single-sheet folded pamphlet contains two pages of text along with the middle two sheets of the map, "Japan's Aim to Dominate the Far East and Pacific Islands". The document was part of a very large collection I bought of the Library of Congress, and according to the pencil notes on the pamphlet it was sent to the L.C. by the "Kuo Min Tang" on May 13, 1933.  (It was curious to see the KMT referred to as though it was someone's name, rather than a political party begun in the People's Republic of China in 1894.)

This is a piece of anti-Japanese propaganda coming from the KMT, and it is published by the Chinese National Salvation Publicity Bureau (844 Stockton Street, which looks today like it is the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall) in San Francisco,  After all, the Japanese had been savaging around in China on and off since the First Sino-Japanese War at the end of the century, and then again heating things up in the early 'thirties with the Japanese-instigated the Shanghai War and the invasion of Manchuria--the Chinese no doubt were seeking allies wherever they could them.  

There are a lot of lines of conquest on this map, encompassing nearly all of South East Asia.  The largest sphere of "influence" extends all the way to the Hawaiian Islands, where the Japanese would take the islands by a "naval battle" with the U.S.  

I've checked WorldCat for other copies and found only one mention--same thing for the internet.  

An Early Appraisal of Life at the Extreme Edges of Earth: the Oceans (1861)

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I just came upon an interesting article on the discovery and possibility of life at extremes on Earth. It was printed in 1861 in Journal of the Franklin Institute and addresses the existence of life at extreme depths of the oceans. The author, George C. Wallich (1815-1899) wrote in his well-reasoned paper¹ that the extreme water pressure in the deep would limit the extent of life to about 400 or 500 fathoms (2400-3000'), and that “...life, whether animal or vegetable, must be extinct”. In similar language, the naturalist Edward G. Forbes wrote² in 1859: "As we descend deeper and deeper in this region, its inhabitants become more and more modified, and fewer and fewer, indicating our approach towards an abyss where life is either extinguished, or exhibits but a few sparks to mark its lingering presence."

Earlier still we find this interesting statement and call to experimentation by Robert Hooke³: “Animals and Vegetables cannot be rationally supposed to live and grow under so great a Pressure, so great a Cold, and at so great a Distance from the Air, as many Parts at the Bottom of very deep Seas are liable and subject to…We have had instances enough of the Fallaciousness of such immature and hasty Conclusions…” These testimonies go back much further, at least to the time of the great classifier, Aristotle, though the possibilities of experimentation at these points were virtually non-existent.

It would be shown just three years later by the father and son naturalists Michael and Georg Ossian Sars that life in Norwegian fjords was found at depths of 3,000 meters, and more life found deeper still (5,000 meters) in the findings of the Challenger Expedition in 1872. Discoveries of life at deep thermal vents in 1977 extended the life-bearing depths further still; currently, as of 2017 at least, rich life has been found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, at depths of 10,600 meters.

This was the beginning of the period of discovery of life at the extreme deep edges of Earth.

Notes:

1. “On the Nature of the Deep-Sea Bed, and the Presence of Animal Life at Vast depths in the Ocean”, pp 237-241, 321-325.

2. E.G, Forbes. The Natural History of the European Seas, London, 1859.

3. William Derham. Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the late Dr. Robert Hooke and other Eminent Virtuosos in his Time, London, 1726, p. 314. 

 

Social Life on the pre-Internet (1922)

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The "pre-Internet" here of course is radio, just as the wired telegraph was the pre-radio, and so on down the turtle stack, and these images and stories from Illustrated World from 1922 celebrate the newness of that invention. The thing about radio though was that the makings for commercial broadcast radio were in place for a good solid decade--maybe even 15 years--before the bright idea landed within someone to broadcast on radio out into the rest of the U.S.  That first honor belongs to KDKA, using Westinghouse equipment and operating from "east Pittsburgh" on November 2, 1920, and discussing the presidential election returns for the Harding-Cox context...and delivering the news so that people could hear it before they read it.  By the time these covers appear in IW radio broadcasting was two years deep, and the idea of expanding the medium's scope was certainly presenting itself--people had gotten married and played checkers before remotely by telegraph, but with some time-lag; and certainly there was no sound involved. This was pretty hot stuff in 1922, a real barometric increase in the possibilities of electronics. (By the way, just two years later, in 1924, there would be 600 commercial broadcast stations, and another three years later RCA would found NBC and go nation-wide.)

A Peep into the Future, Technology, and Socialism (1901)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2815  (Thanks to Cosmo Rare Books, where I saw a reference to this work; all images and text for the Wintle article are found at Hathi Trust.) 

W.J. (William James) Wintle, "Life in our New Century", in The Harmsworth/London Magazine, volume 5 (new series) #30, pp 531-538, 1901.

(Source with full text and other illustrations at Hathi Trust.)

W.J. Wintle contributed a sober look into the near-future of technology and society, basing his outlook not so much on possibilities but on existing (or nearly/possibly so) tech, which is a smart move for trying to access the expansion of human knowledge: "To try to peep into the future is the work of the seer or the prophet, and we make no claim to be either the one or the other. But there are certain tendencies of modern progress and discovery which will become translated into actual facts within a very few years, and it needs no prophet to fore cast what these will be."

The author (who contributed regularly to the magazine) raises some interesting and reasonable technical points which for the most part are mostly correct, in a larger and more general sense. The details of the technical developments miss the point and in many cases are superseded by far more elegant inventions and discoveries that would take place in mere decades, if not sooner, rushing the “future” of Mr. Wintle (1861-1934) into a timeline within his own lifetime...which happens all of the time.

For example his discussion of “Hertzian waves” soon gives over to the development of the pocket telegraph. Here though he does raise a very interesting point which to my experience is very scarce—he points out that with this pocket telegraph it makes it possible for a person to communicate with another person without knowing where they were. ("...a system of pocket telegraphy, by means of which a man may carry his own apparatus in his pocket and receive messages even from people who. do not know where he is").

That idea would certainly have been a shocking revelation to the high Victorian.

On Not Discovering X-Rays (1890)

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In the long list of "photographic firsts" the following is a rare case--a first that wasn't a first that may have became a first, though no one recognized it as such until the true first was recognized. Huh?

This is the story of Arthur W. Goodspeed (1860-1943) and William Jennings (1860-1946) and their brief brush with immortality. While using a Crookes tube and  photographing electric sparks and brush discharges in their lab at the University of Pennsylvania in 1890 they produced a photograph of unknown certainty and imagery. They did not pursue the anomaly and stowed the photographic plate away in archives. After the Roentgen discovery in 1895 and seeing the first results in early 1896 they knew exactly what it was they had photographed, and just hadn't recognized that what they were seeing was revolutionary. They retrieved and published the photograph along with their story in Science on February 14, 1896 (vol 3 #59), and a short account of the narrative was published in Scientific American on April 11, 1896, along with the photograph. To their great credit the two physicists made no claim to discovery:

• “We can claim no merit for the discovery—for no discovery was made. All we ask is that you remember, gentlemen, that six years ago. day for day, the first picture in the world by cathodic ray was taken in the Physical Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania."

I reprint the article and the photo below.  

The Urban Rooftop Airport Idea in 1920

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This is another unexpected find of an urban rooftop airport¹/dirigible docking station from 1920.  The idea has a certain amount of sense to it, especially here in the still relatively restricted early history of aviation, just 13 years past Kill Devil Hills, and two past the great expansion of flight following the end of WWI. It is an interesting mix of modernity when coupled with growth of the skyscraper², which is just living through the beginning of its fourth decade.  On the other hand...well, there are a lot of obvious problems with an idea like this, too many to go through in a simple post just intending to share an evocative image. It was a tempting peek into the future, and as we can see one of the dirigibles advertisers "transatlantic", the first of which wouldn't occur by dirigible uintil the Graf Zeppelin in 1928. The planes are way too big, and so on. (Is that the Plaza Hotel in the foreground?) The rendering itself is very pretty, and has a certain Renaissance-y quality too it, especially with the etching-like rendering of the sky.  

If you're interested there are probably ten posts on such ideas in this blog--just enter "airport" in the Google search box for the site and you'll find them.

(Source: Popular Mechanics, December 1920, pg 912.)

Notes.

1. "Airport" and "Air port" first appears in the OED in 1902 in the great Brooklyn Eagle, though I'm unsure of its aviation context ( Brooklyn Daily Eagle 10 Apr. 1/2   "I hope New York will be the greatest airport in the world"). There is a clearer usage in 1914 (Times 16 Mar. 5/3   "The time will come when, with the development of aviation, every town of importance will need an air-port as it now needs a railway station") that leaves no doubt the reference is for airplanes.  

2. "Skyscraper" (and "sky scraper" and "sky-scraper") in the architectural sense draws on a long history of common and colloquial use: it first appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a nautical term relating to a tall horse (1788), and then used to refer to a  sail (1791), tall bonnet (1800), high flying ball in sports (1842), tall person (1847), exaggerated story (1890), and so on.  The use of the term relating to a tall building (generally 10 to 13 floors high) appears in 1883

Found Sci-Fi: Proto-Robot Head (1866)

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Anthropomorphic images make their sudden appearances now and again in technical illustration, though they do less so when they surprise the viewer with a simultaneous endo/exo view of the "head" of such pre-vizualization robots. The image here is the view of a plan of "the Darby Blowing Engine at Ebbw [sic] Vale Ironworks" and appears in the second volume of Engineering, September 7, 1866.  The engraving bears a faint resemblance to the Iron Giant, giving both an internal and external view of the workings of the head. Anyway, that's what I see in it...