JF Ptak Science Books

"Whether Slavery was Right or Wrong..." On the Future of the Freed Slaves in the U.S. (Nashville, 1867)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2528--expanded 

De Bow's Review in 1867--in the dire straights of the antebellum South, in the doom and despair of the just-finished war--lashed out like a wicked Alex Jones conspiratorial wingnut against the Northern states and anyone who comforted them.  Published in Nashville, all I have of the magazine presently is this loose issue for November 1867, and in spite of the energetically positive view depicted on the cover of the magazine had little to do with what you found in the writing inside.  

The leading article is an odd one, yelling about Great Britain manufacturing the cause of anti-slavery in the United States, which pretty much is made abundantly clear in the title,  "Black Republicanism, the Dupe and Agent of British Policy in Respect to American Interests". The "scheme of so-called Negro Emancipation...is a British Invention" crushing the U.S. which "suffered immeasurably" under the Abolition Program, "the fatal deadfall of the abolition trap", all of which in the end will "crush the innards out of the "Black Republican Yankee".  It was the Brits according to the writer of this article who FORCED THE UNITED STATES TO ABOLISH SLAVERY" [caps in the original]. 

"The Perfect Smoke Column"—the New Miracle of Electronics, 1952

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Liggett & Myers, the producer of Chesterfield cigarettes, sounds the triumphal blast of "the greatest cigarette improvement in thirty years" in this LIFE magazine ad from 1953. It was all made possible by SCIENCE and the sacred mysteries of electronics, which helped create the "perfect-smoke-column-from-end-to-end", which doesn't sound all that appetizing though I guess it was if you were a lazy or distracted ciggie consumer. To prove the claim we see a model with perfect un-ciggied teeth with an inset of electronic machinery in the background, which made it look as though the stuff was being produced by the machine.

The machine doing the great scientific deed was the AccuRay. It was a measure and control system produced by Industrial Nucleonics (beignning their industrial life in 1912 as a steam power supply systems company), which ensured that the cigarettes would be the same, million after million, each being the same length and with the same mount of tobacco. "Scientific miracles never cease", said the Liggett & Myers people, and I guess the stained proof was in the smokey pudding.

It may have been all about the burning, as a cigarette that doesn't need to be drawn on to keep it lit means that it will burn itself out in the allotted time even if you just lighted the thing and kept it in the ashtray. Better burning meant more cigarettes consumed, and so on.

And by the way Industrial Nucleonics was sold in 1987 to a perhaps more appropriately-named Cumbustion Engineering, at least so far as cigarettes were concerned.

The Encouragement of Insanity (1877)

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Well. The Scientific American (1913) delivered quite a blow against the current "craze" of spiritualisms and seances, which they characterize as a mixture of "self-deception and knavery".  They had no room for it whatsoever, and let their readers know it. These practices were "symptoms of mental degradation that will cast adrift principles...and elect to run riot in vain imaginings and idle conceits". The editor also brought The Lancet on board in the condemnation of the Spiritualism racket, quoting the great medical journal saying that the talking-to-the-dead racket was "debilitating to the mind and so debauching to moral sense it needs to be stigmatized in terms at once trenchant and decisive".  An Edgar A. Poe vicious book review this is not, though they do communicate their displeasure with the whole racket in very forceful words.

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. 

"Flying Saucers" (1952)

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I want to spend only a few minutes on this subject as I have just now come upon a nicely-written and logical response to the "flying saucer" issue in the pages of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society¹ for 1952.  Rather than discuss it I'm just going to reproduce the two pages of the piece below.  I did bend to curiosity a bit here and checked out "flying saucer" and "U.F.O." in the Oxford English Dictionary, just to get a sense of how quickly they came into being following the hysteria of 1946.  Turns out that the BIS is no stranger to the term, the OED listing it second in usage back in 1948, back when the word still had its new-car-smell, though as you can see it hardly registered so with the members of the Society.

“Flying saucer” n.: the fanciful name given to various unidentified disc- or saucer-shaped objects reported as appearing in the sky.

• 1947   Times 8 July 4/4   During the past fortnight reports that dish-like objects, nicknamed ‘flying saucers’, have been seen travelling through the air at great speed..have come from the United States and Canada.
• 1948   Jrnl. Brit. Interplanetary Soc. 7 199   I haven't examined the details carefully, but the ‘flying saucers’ bear all the hall-marks of mass-suggestion.
• 1953   D. Leslie & G. Adamski Flying Saucers have Landed i. i. 13   Ever since the cliché ‘flying saucer’ was coined, the greatest and most exciting mystery of our age has been automatically reduced to the level of a music hall joke.

“U.F.O.”, n.: An unidentified flying object; a ‘flying saucer’.

• 1953   D. E. Keyhoe in Air Line Pilot Oct. 9/3   The UFO was estimated to be between 12,000 and 20,000 feet above the jets.
• 1956   E. J. Ruppelt Rep. Unidentified Flying Objects 13   UFO is the official term that I created to replace the words ‘flying saucers’.

[Click for a cleaner and larger image]

An "Analog" Telephone (1878)

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Long-distance audio communication pre-telephone looked a little like this, brought to the world by Thomas Edison. What we've looking at here is a fellow positioned between a megaphone and listening devices--used in concert, they may have been able to communicate with a similarly-encumbered person a mile or two away (absent hills and dales and trees and buildings and so on...). All of this technology is very old: for example, the famous "Horn of Alexander" going all the way back to, well, Alexander the Great, who was said to be able to communicate by voice with troops ten miles distant. Athanasius Kircher also wrote about Old Tech in this department in his Ars Magna (1646) and Phonurga Nova (1674). It is interesting that Edison was tinkering around with this in the year following Bell's telephone.  

There were at least several different versions of this scene, usually featuring one or two or four other people--this one comes from Nature of 24 October 1878 (the first version seeming to be in Scientific American of 24 August 1878),. 

An Apparatus for Inhaling Thorium (1904)

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In researching the highly-unexpected mage of a thorium inhaler found in Scientific American for 1904 and trying to find out why someone would inhale the radioactive and toxic gas (discovered by J.J. Berzelius in 1829), I found an article with three transporting sentences that lifted themselves from the page:

"Small glass tubes containing radium bromide are placed
within accessible mucous cavities, i.e., mouth, vagina."

"Radium and thorium continually emit gases, which gases
themselves give out on their own account rays exactly
similar to the rays from radium and thorium themselves.
Hence a thorium inhaler is now used, by which these gases
are inhaled."--The Journal of the British Homoeopathic Society, vol XII, new series, London 1904.  

Of course the scientific and medical world was trying to figure out what applications could be made with the new discoveries of Roentgen and the Curies and Becquerel and all, but even with the modern lens looking backwards it still is a bit of a wincing experience to read about these applications.

Pressing on from the quacky homeopathy journal I found  another in the Medical Record which more fully explained the apparatus and treatment:

"Thorium in TubercuIosis.  Dr Soddy of London and Professor Rutherford of Montreal have suggested the use of thorium inhalations for tuberculosis. Certainly from its antiseptic and antifermentative actions it would appear to be a desirable agent to apply directly to the tissues affected in the fight against the tubercle bacillus."

[Note: M. Curie and Gerhard Schmidt determine and demonstrate that thorium is radioactive in 1897-8; Soddy and Rutherford discovered thorium X in 1902.]

The note continues:

--Medical Record: A ... Journal of Medicine and Surgery, edited by George Frederick Shrady, Thomas Lathrop Stedman; New York, William Wood,  1904, Volume 65, page 128. 

Another short description of the work of the inhaler:

"The procedure leaves in the lungs a fine film of radio active matter which in turn produces the phenomenon of induced radio activity in the same parts which may last for one or two days. This is shown by the patient after inhaling thorium emanations exhaling on a photographic plate which produces the ordinary effects on the silver salts..."--Mihran Krikor Kassabian,Röntgen Rays and Electro-therapeutics: With Chapters on Radium and Phototherapy, New York, 1907, page 508.

That is a tough go.

The Wiki article on thorium has this to say about more than standard/casual exposure to thorium: "Natural thorium decays very slowly compared to many other radioactive materials, and the alpha radiation emitted cannot penetrate human skin. As a result, owning and handling small amounts of thorium, such as those in a gas mantle, is considered safe, although usage of such items may pose some risks. Exposure to an aerosol of thorium, such as contaminated dust, can lead to increased risk of cancers of the lung, pancreas, and blood, as lungs and other internal organs can be penetrated by alpha radiation. Exposure to thorium internally leads to increased risk of liver diseases."

It is not known to me how much of a dose of thorium was intended for the user of this cure.

The "Reactionary Lifter" and a Fist of Blood, 1872

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This design screams out --yes, the "outside scream"--for attention of some sort.  It is a five square inch ad crowded into a crowded 140 square inch page in a supplemental section to Harper's Weekly, August 3, 1872.  The circular part is less than two inches in the original but it commands the big page, and is about the only thing your eyes can focus on until the ad is at least acknowledged and/or read. 

The ad is for the "Reactionary Lifter", an uninspired and slightly cumbersome name for an exercise apparatus that was made of hydraulics and pull-me devices that used the person's own weight to exercise against.  The machine itself doesn't seem that interesting, though the price does. At $100 it would take the average machinist or a similar skilled job probably a year to save a hundred dollars while making $10/week and then removing expenses, so this exercise machine was a significant expense. There is no mention of a price in the Harpers placement, which I guess was a good move so as not not frighten off the casual reader. 

In any event, I liked the graphic.

Note on Life on the Rings of Saturn and the Plurality of Adams & Eves (1859)

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I've been reading through the notes and bibliography of Michael Crowe's  excellent  The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900  and decided to post a few of the early-modern scientific speculations on extraterrestrial life.  The first is from Hollis Read's (1802-1887) concentrically-connective theo-explanations/celebrations of life in the universe, The palace of the Great King : or, The power, wisdom and goodness of God, illustrated in the multiplicity and variety of His works  (New York, Scribner, 1859). It is published in the same year as On the Origin of Species..., and takes a decidedly different theological spin on interpreting Nature. It does take a very interesting turn on page 224 though (not the probably-misprinted page 160 as Crowe notes) where Read speculates on intelligent life elsewhere, and winds up on the Rings of Saturn, which would have no doubt delighted Kurt Vonnegut. 

In some sense Read buries his speculations on life on the rings, occurring in the middle of a paragraph in the middle of the book, and seems not to go any further with it.  He says that there are 28 billion square miles (on both sides) of the rings ("588 times the whole habitable portion of the earth"), which he feels could support a population of 8 billion, which he said is 10,000 times that of the earth.  It seems he just extrapolated the population/density of the Earth to that of Saturn's rings to get that figure--I should point out that "billion" here actually means "trillion", which was one custom of the day, so the 10k number Read came up with is more-or-less accurate.

There really isn't a reason given from I've read in Read for the possibility of life on Saturn's rings, except that the beauty the rings must be fitted for something other than "waste and desolation".  I've wondered about the theological issues about Life Elsewhere in natural law theo-scientific books like this--like, well, what about Adam and Eve?  Had they been present would they have been so just here on Earth, or would they have been better off on the rings?  Or are there Adams and Eves wherever they are needed? Or--to paraphrase an old story--would it have been Adams&Eves all the way down?  It seems as though that may have been a tricky question to answer...

• [Source: full text of the Read book is available via the Internet Archive from the University of California, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006524997]

 

 

Robot Boots without the Robot--German Coal Mining Iron Boots, 1920

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This post is from the "Oh Sweet Mother of Neptune" series, because that is that you say out loud when you see pictures like this.  

Found in the January 1920 issue of Illustrated World is this photograph, illustrating yet another mysterious and bad turn of the many hard angles found in the Treaty of Versailles.  The worker with a pick is a coal miner, and yes, he is wearing galvanized iron boots.  

It turns out that the Nuderlansitz coal mining region was flooded after the war, and after the draining came more water and a lot more mud. Seeing as there was a severe rubber shortage in Germany at the time, and that coal miners needed to mine, the suggestion pictured here were these galvanized iron boots.  

No note is made in regards to the weight of the boots.

Killing the Dead Poe, 1849

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2534

Carl Sandburg (whose house is about 5 miles from here) wrote a long, light-but-heavy, airy three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln that is said to have killed the president, again. Rufus Griswold, a once semi-friend of Edgar Allen Poe, became a bitter enemy whose hatred of the man extended pathologically deeply far into Poe's death.  There are stories of cross-loved interests, and competition over a job, and the biggest (or more representative) thing--Poe's lukewarm review of Griswold's genre-twisting collection of American poetry, for which Poe was paid by Griswold, a bribe producing a coercion of Griwold's work. Poe was evidently never forgiven for that, and probably never forgiven for being legions smarter and far more talented than Griswold--and for all of these real or imagined ills Griswold drove a stake through Poe's eye in this very nasty obituary.  It was signed with a pseudonym, but it was soon discovered that Griswold was the author.  

The obit is a diatribe, pure and simple, a revenge piece that pulled Poe from his grave and killed him again. You can tell that the long column will cleave Poe in two by the end of the second and third (short) sentences: "He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it".  You know at that point that whatever comes to follow will offer a rough ride, which indeed it was.  There's a lot of stuff about his personal life, including a long an meandering section on his stepfather---and not one mention of anything that he wrote.  

Griswold clawed his way into the heart of Poe's remains like a meth addict tracking down a ten dollar bill under a soda machine, and proceeded to defame Poe and his life via forged letters, and thus creating Poe the madman/street-crawler/drug-addicted alchie who was a friendless and betraying  and brutal to anyone he knew. It took a while for Griswold's crimes against Poe to be uncovered, but the damage was done, and life force thief Griswold was safely tucked into his own dirt nap.  No one deserves that sort of treatment, least of all Poe.  In the end the truth was outed, with Poe recognized as himself again, with Griswold becoming the pathological necro-killer.  

 

[Image source: Awesome Stories,  https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Poe-Obituary-by-Rufus-Griswold, reprinting the obit as it appeared in the New York Tribune, October 9, 1849.]

The Madonna in Stone, Again (1665)

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Continuing this blog's occasional thread on the great, idiosyncratic, and troublesome Fr. Athanasius Kircher, I report on this spectacular image. It is supposed to be an engraving of a found-image in a piece of agate or some such, showing the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, surrounded by s curiously radiating display of "light".  According to one reference the image first appears with Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) who must have included it with one of the natural histories before it founds its way into Kircher's Mundus¹.  

The partial description above the print references the Church Grottes Vald (in Lucerne), where this relic was to be found.  

And the full sheet, in two parts:

And the bottom half that wouldn't fit on the scanner:

In reality these are simply on the same sheet, uninterrupted.

The second image is identified so: "Sceleton humani corporis in saxum conversum..."², and refers to what was supposed to be fossilized human remains covered by some sort of fossil -something.  The remains weren't fossilized, of course, but in 1657, that was the difficult leap that was make. 

Notes:

1.  The full title by Kircher (1602-1680): Mundus subterraneus, in XII libros digestus : qvo divinum subterrestris mundi opificium, mira ergasteriorum naturae in eo distributio, verbo [pantamorphon] Protei regnum, universae denique naturae majestas & divitiae summa rerum varietate exponuntur, abditorum effectuum causae acri indagine inquistae demonstrantur, cognitae per artis & naturae conjugium ad humanae vitae necessarium usum vario experimentorum apparata, necnon novo modo & ratione applicantur. Ad Alexandrum VII. pont. opt. max, 1665. 

2. This image can be seen in full text in a somewhat later edition of the Mundus of 1678 at Heidelburg http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kircher1678bd2/0062 and another series of images at University of Oklahoma, http://hos.ou.edu/galleries//17thCentury/Kircher/1665-det-composites/. 

Upset in the Belly, Insanity and Murder: a Southern Interpretation, 1831

JF Ptak Science Books  Extending Post 647 (from 2009)  Blog Bookstore

Thomas Cooper, a merry, upper-educated intellectual called “a learned and talented mapcap” by none other than John Adams, wrote from his secure chair at South Carolina College a translation of a rather individual effort in explaining insanity’s connection with moral outrages.  The work, published in Columbia (South Carolina) is called On Irritation and Insanity ... to which are added Two Tracts on Materialism, and an outline of the Association of Ideas, was written by Francis Joseph Victor Broussais (1772-1838) and introduced an unusual, foreign approach to the connection between sanity and malevolence.  Brousssais’ work may not have required such attention. 

 

He wrote, for example:

"The causes of this morbid state consist always in irritation of the trisplanchnic apparatus, and especially in that of the stomach, acting on the brain. [Italics mine] This last viscus, may be such, by its normal constitution, as to give a propensity to cruelty ; but in the morbid state it is a sense of uneasiness perceived through the whole splanchnic apparatus, comprehending the brain itself, which renders ideas of murder predominant in spite of reason. This horrible perversion may be considered, as well as that of suicide, as a species of chronic anger or hatred, which impels the individual sometimes against himself, sometimes against other men or against inanimate objects. We have already considered it under a subacute form in furious mania ; but in the modification in which we now describe it, it is entirely chronic and apyretic. In fact it may be extremely obstinate, and conceal itself under the appearances of calm, of joy, of benevolence, until the lunatic finds the opportunity of executing his horrible project."

 I can see these words being written by candle light.

• Full text via Google books, here: http://tinyurl.com/ocyezpb

 James Cowle Prittchard early on dispensed with M. Broussais, writing  in his A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (published by Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell in 1837, just six years after the Cooper translation) states:

“Such is M. Broussais' theory of these phenomena. It must be allowed that various irritations, and especially those in the digestive organs, often give rise to irritability of temper; but that any such state as that .which M. Broussais has described is a cause, and even the principal cause, of moral insanity, and in particular of that intense excitement of malevolent propensity which leads to murder and suicide, is a position which, before it can be admitted, requires proof; and no such proof has been afforded by the ingenious writer who has advanced this hypothesis. It must be confessed that this subject is as yet enveloped in obscurity.”

As it turns out Broussais recommended courses of bleeding, diet, soothing drinks, applications of cold and mild purgatives to treat insanity.  This went somewhat against the established regimen of treatment (but of different philosophical and theoretical approach to the idea of insanity) of Benjamin Rush, who practiced all of the above but of harsher application and with more force.  Broussais at  least advocated a more temperate approach to bleeding, that it not be "severe", and that the strength of the insane not be completely diluted by massive exposures to dunking and the cold.  The translator Cooper, however, disagreed with the milder treatments, establishing for the record that the hotter and harsher  temperatures of the South required harsher and colder treatment. From page vi of Cooper's [reface we read: “The Southern climate of the United States , seems to require more bold and decisive practice, than the Northern climate of Paris or London : then, to us, the therapeutics of Broussais, Begin, Coster, &c. appear feeble; but the principles, founded on the physiology and pathology of the tissues, are undeniable and universally applicable.”

Such was the spirit of the day.  Broussais is not even a shadow, today:  he tried to establish a connection between gastrointestinal distresses and insanity, and that was seen as futile even by immediate contemporaries. Cooper survives because of his far reach into many disciplines--his treatment of Broussais, well, is memorable for his appeal to treat the insane differently in courts of law because of what he viewed as their diminished capacities.  

One of the Many Mona Lisas of Early Flying Machines

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I'm pretty sure that I've only written a plural of "Mona Lisa" a few times before in my history of writing--and that in reference to the real one, when it was stolen by Vincenzo Perugia (and company?) in 1911. (My guess is that it was stolen on demand for a collector and then offered for sale to a number of other underworld-y collectors who were sold fakes--at that point, what could they do (?) given that they couldn't exactly report the swindle to the police.) For me there are some iconic image of flying machines that made the news in the pre-Wright Brothers era, and I would consider the one here to be one of them.

It was designed by W. Ayres and happily and nattily appeared in the pages of the Scientific America (1885). It seems to have been a kind of helicopter/ornithopter, partially human powered and partially powered by compressed air that would run a generator that would run the little propellers situated around the aircraft.  The frame of the craft was made of 1/4" steel tubes, though there is no indication of their thickness. Given that there's something like 40 feet of this pipe superstructure, I'm going to guess that the pipe was a pound/foot; then given the weight of the pilot, and the other bits and pieces, this antique drone would have to work very hard to lift its 200' payload.  The (May 9th) article states that there is enough power generated to lift that 200 pounds, but...

In any event, I really like the image.  

"The Fatal Deadfall of Abolition"--Threatening the Newly-Freed Southern Slaves, 1867

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2528

De Bow's Review in 1867, in the dire straights of the antebellum South, in the doom and despair of the just-finished war, lashed out like a wicked Alex Jones conspiratorial wingnut against the Northern states and anyone who comforted them.  Published in Nashville, all I have of the magazine presently is this loose issue for November 1867, and in spite of the energetically positive view depicted on the cover of the magazine had little to do with what you found in the writing inside.  

The leading article is an odd one, yelling about Great Britain manufacturing the cause of anti-slavery in the United States, which pretty much is made abundantly clear in the title,  "Black Republicanism, the Dupe and Agent of British Policy in Respect to American Interests". The "scheme of so-called Negro Emancipation...is a British Invention" crushing the U.S. which "suffered immeasurably" under the Abolition Program, "the fatal deadfall of the abolition trap", all of which in the end will "crush the innards out of the "Black Republican Yankee".  It was the Brits according to the writer of this article who FORCED THE UNITED STATES TO ABOLISH SLAVERY" [caps in the original].