JF Ptak Science Books

Presidential Yard Sale/Give (1913)

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This is just a small and short post about an unusual bit/bob from the White House. William Howard Taft to me was Mr. In-Between: he was the president between Roosevelt and Wilson, and he was in there about in between half the bad-ish and half the good-ish presidents, squarely in the middle, I think. He was also Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he was probably a better justice than he was a president, which would put him among the accomplished of his brethren. I remember him mostly for wanting to try to hang on to his chief justice role at least until Herbert Hoover was out of office--he found Hoover to be too liberal for his tastes, memorably referring to the not-Liberal president as "Bolsheviskii", which has a certain "wow" factor to it. But what I'm drawing your attention to is the pamphlet Conservation of Natural resources--Meeting of Engineers, printed in 1909. The interesting part is that this was transferred out of the White House library on March 3, 1913, Taft's last full day in office, which makes it sound as though there was a bit of shelf cleaning going on right to the bitter end before Wilson came in, making this a curious tiny bit of ephemera.

Getting Everything Wrong in 1937 (Gerald L.K. Smith)

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This little pamphlet packed a lot of bitter bilious hope into its small-framed four pages. The  Committee of 1,000,000 was the work of the past-and-present pastor Gerald L.K.Smith, a rabid far-rightist who seemed to be present at the birth of most of the bad ideas of the 1930s and 1940s. He was a white supremist anti-Semite ultranationalsit pro-Nazi who started his major political life as a national organizer for Huey Long, an ally of Townsend and Coughlin, and the founder of the America First Party. He was a presidential candidate running in   against what he considered to be the Communist Franklin Roosevelt, was a member of William Pelley's neo-Nazi Silver Shirts in 1942, advocated for the early release of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, denied the Holocaust saying that six million Jews weren't murdered but emigrated to the U.S....and, well, you get the picture. The little leaflet was printed in 1937 and evidently was owned by H.L. Mencken (who kept his fingers on the pulse of such dangerous folks) though he gave it up to the Library of Congress after only a few months. The leaflet is printed on only one sheet of paper, and I reproduce it below. 

"The Conflagration May Lead to a Good Result..." (1877)

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There are sometimes positive results from fires, though I think not so in this case of the devastating fire that burned much of the U.S. Patent Office building on 24 September 1877 that is the subject fire of the header of this post. Perhaps the writer of the piece (appearing in Scientific American on 1 October 1877) was desperate to find some ray of goodness in the great fire that destroyed half of the USPO building along with 136,000 patent models...which in the old days to that present was a requirement in some areas to obtain a patent in the U.S. About the fire-consumed models the writer states that "the loss is of no great importance" which is a bizarre statement, and that their places on the shelves come along at 20,000 new patents per year, so the new space generated by their loss would be occupied in seven years. The case is then made for the silver lining, which would be to do away with the physical model requirement for a patent.  It was no doubt an appropriate conversation to have, but to try to establish the efficacy of doing away with the models by establishing that it hardly mattered whether the models existed or not is a tough go. 

This was evidently the second great fire at the USPO (following the 1836 fire) and it consumed much of the building. It was designed by Robert Mills (architect, and designer of the Washington Monument, under construction 1848-1885) and was mostly fireproof, except for the roof and all of the stuff inside the building, so it was fireproof for all that was fireproof, and not for that that wasn't. 

Anyway, this was a strange article, well outside my standard experience with SciAm. 

A Good and Quirky Basis for a Holmesian Mystery--How to Kill Someone With Silk Thread (1877)

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And so it came to pass that a metal merchant was found drowned in the Thames, weighed down by his own wares, his jacket and greatcoat and pants--even his hat--filled with lead, his feet encased in lead, as were his hands.  The only reason the body was found was because of a severe summer drought which lowered the level of the river enough to reveal all manner of hidden nastiness, including the leaden mineral maven, Mr. Sockety. In and of itself this murder wasn't all that interesting aside from it being bizarre...except over the following months there were a number of deaths of young women who had, as it turned out, a common touchstone--they all were seamtresses, and their specialty was silk thread. Then place here all of the interesting stuff that happens in mysteries >HERE<  until we get to the Eureka! moment that Holmes would know about halfway through==>they were looking for the tradesperson, Mr. Plump, who supplied the silk thread to these workers. Silk thread was expensive, so Mr. Plump committed fraud  and treated his silk thread with lead, multiplying the expensive thread's value and which also made it lethal to its users.  Plump--seeing the damage that had been done and the people who had been killed as a result of his fraud--decides to kill Sockety to cover his tracks.  So on.

This all came about as a result of seeing this interesting sidebar story in the 15 July 1877 issue of Scientific American:

 

Defining What "Flying" Is, or Was (1894)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2899    

What does “flight” mean, anyway? How much do you have to be off the ground for something to be “flying”? If the answer is “two feet off the ground for 500 feet”, then Hiram Maxim did indeed succeed in being the first to construct a heavier-than-air aircraft that “flew”. Perhaps this definition might be a little broad, or narrow, though it does make falling sound like flying, too.

In any event, that is what Mr. Maxim (1840-1916) did on 31 July 1894 with his enormous aeroplane as reported in the Scientific American of 15 September 1894 ("Maxim's Flying Machine").  He invested a good amount of money in the project funded by his tremendously successful “Hiram gun”, creating a number of aircraft before settling in on a great beast of a flying machine in 1894.

The image of the aircraft is a perspective looking up at it, as though it were in flight. It wasn't, though it was a semi-romantical thought and presentation. It had big numbers: 7000 pounds, 17.5' diameter propellers, 2 steam-powered 180hp engines, 120' long and 105' wide, and 8” cylinders with a 5” stroke. Big numbers.

One of the images that really struck me though was the steam chamber, which looks absolutely huge (though I can't find dimensions for it), but you can make it out on the aircraft's bow. For test runs 600 pounds of water were needed—2500 pound were needed to generate lift.

So back to the “flight” issue; Mr. Maxim was on board the 3-person-crew aircraft on the day of the test. The aircraft was tethered to an 1800' wooden rail to prevent it from actually taking off if it could...I think mainly because they were really just testing lift, as controlled flight was still yet another enormous issue. The aircraft did manage to achieve lift two feet above the rail, but the force was so great it ripped up the rail and crashed. (Mr. maxim found himself in a somewhat similar position to that of Frankenstein when overpowered by the monster which he himself had fabricated and endowed with life.") No one was hurt, though the aircraft was decimated. As the writer in the Sci Am stated, "the ride in this way was brought to a sudden stop, and it will be several months before it can be renewed". It isn't anything like the Wright's flight nine years later, though some do consider this Maxim experiment to constitute a “first flight”.

One thing is certain: it was a lovely and impressive thing that Maxim built--it wasn't elegant by any means, though it had a certain crushing charm to it.  

Here's a photo of the aircraft (with a person standing right there in front of it, for scale):

(Image source: ctie.monesh.edu.au/hargrave/maxim.html)

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

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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

Cell vs. Cell: Photoelectric Cell and Shooting a Prisoner for Escaping their Cell (1930)

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The photoelectric cell was a mature invention (appearing in 1883) when it became armed and lethal in 1930.  Popular Mechanics published this photo (explained with only a caption and a paragraph) in its July 1930 issue. We see that should a prisoner make a dash up and over the prison wall, they interrupt the "electric eye" sentry which we read (1) fires a pistol positioned along the wall and (2) sounds an alarm, simultaneously.  It seems as though the alarm system could be reconstituted at the base of the wall, sounding an alarm before the prisoner got to the wall (let alone up and over it), rather than shooting as the alarm sounds.  The consequences of this idea--which I suspect was never implemented--were, well, rather extreme.

A Sober Appraisal of "the Flying Saucer" (1948)

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This slightly engaging cover of Popular Science offers its readers a sober appraisal of the still very popularly new phenomenon of “the flying saucer”. Not “flying saucer” plural--”the” flying saucer phenom, complete at this point with a definite article...I have no idea when the “the” disappeared. In any event it is a pretty good explanation, though there is no mention here of “The Battle of Los Angeles”, when in 1942 aircraft batteries and searchlights blazed away into the high night air trying to stop a supposed Japanese attack. Six people on the ground were killed by shrapnel and debris, with no damage to anything flying overhead reported. There were some wild theories about what the “attack” was, along with accusations of cover-ups and political/economic conspiracies, and that seems to have been the extent of the matter. In any event, Pop Sci takes up the case of the weather balloon as a general explanation to people seeing intelligent life forms scooting around in our sky but not bothering to stop and say “hello”.

Just in case anyone is interested, here's the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “flying saucer”:

--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.
• 1965   New Society 9 Sept. 14/2   When Kenneth Arnold saw something from his airplane near Mount Rainier in June 1947, he gave them the happy name of flying saucers.

Nature Magazine Reviews Hitler (1933)

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Here's a razor-sharp summation and review of Adolf Hitler, being an uncommon appearance of that man and his "science" in Nature, volume 132, p. 198, 1933. 

"That the Nazi leader stands self-revealed as an ill-balanced, fanatical and otherwise abnormal is immaterial. What is supremely significant is that he has come into power on a wave of popular discontent  with present day social, political and economic conditions which is sufficiently intense to submit to previously unheard of restrictions for which a "scientific" backing is advanced."

A Nasty Piece of Propaganda from French Collaborationists (1943)

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The offending pamphlet here is a celebration of the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany, a "two year anniversary" of the beginning of "Operation Barbarossa". The author(s) presented the new front in WWII as a "joined" effort on the part of European nations to rid the world of the Bolshevik threat. (The title of the work: Toute l'Europe contre le Bolchevisme, 2^eme Anniversaire which was published by CEA, the Centre d’Etude Antibolchéviquethe (Anti-Bolshevik Studies organization), a French organization running with Nazi funding.)

The pamphlet of course fails to mention the turning of the tide against the Germans, especially with the defeat and destruction of von Paulus and the 6th Army at Stalingrad in January/February 1943, the failure of the Caucasus push, and so on. Then again, this is a piece of propaganda, and facts can be conveniently excluded whenever necessary.  A few pages later by the way there is the introduction of Bolshevism being the invention of "International Judaism" and other anti-Semitic lies that was an attempt to perpetuate the fiction of the Nazis and the Allies working together to defeat Stalin and his Jewish co-conspirators in quest of world domination.. Besides the text supporting this stab-in-the-heart thinking is a horrible caricature of "international Jewry" combining with Bolshevism and Freemasonry (?) as a force out to capture the world. 

Events antithetical to this propaganda were excluded--I did check out some of the numbers for the battle represented below (like Smolensk and Vizma (Moscow) and those are correct...these battles were mainly fought in 1941/early 1942 at which point the Nazi offensive was still going forward, so there's not much from 1943. So numbers and events that supported the crucially insane claims of the pamphlet were used; everything else was ignored or re-packaged with false data and employed. 

When the Opposite of an Idea is the Better Idea (1922)

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Here's a suggestion for a new category for this blog: Ideas That May Be Better Backwards. The idea is presented in this wonderful image from Popular Mechanics in 1922 and features an endless trolley/conveyor of food that moves past stationary diners at a restaurant. You'd sit down, and gobs of food would be presented on an endless conveyor, moving along at probably 1 mph. This idea makes sort of very quick 3-beer sense, until you think of the probable waste and the cost of machinery and energy that it took to trundle the food along, and then replacing all of it that went cold, and so on. It seems to me the opposite might be the better if not still-bad idea: putting the patron seating area on a revolving stage and have a central location for the food where they'd take what they wanted. The conveyor-of-food idea withers next to the great Automat, where people would simply walk up to a long bank of small windowed receptacles with different foods inside, drop a few coins into the slot opening the lovely little (but thick) door, after which you'd simply find a place to sit and eat. (This automat was a German 19th c idea, and it became popular in the U.S. in the 1930s'-1960's, with Horn & Hardart leading the way with 30 or so locations in NYC. The H&H variety closed up by the early 1990's, their locations converted into Burger King meat/fat/carb slingshops.) Here it is:

 The image reminded me of one I saw for the very restrictive penitent/observer prisoner in chapel at Pentonville Prison in 1855--I know it is hardly similar whatsoever to the food-on-a-belt, but the two did come together somehow in my head:

[Source: lost! Apologies.]

A Tank at an Amusement Park (1920)

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There is something lingering and heartbreaking about this image found in Popular Mechanics for July, 1920. The image shows a refitted tank being used as a curious ride at an amusement park. No doubt people wanted to put WWI behind them, as the end of the war was still only two years old or so, and the imagery of millions of people killed during the conflict was still very recent, with the hardships and loss still quite present in the minds of nearly everyone in the world.  That said, the image of the smiling faces on the retrofitted tanks a bit much, seeming to be this side of disrespectful. Seeing the "Jeep" brand doesn't affect me like this--as the logo has almost nothing left in connection to the WWII vehicle, though I do feel a bit annoyed when I see a deluxe High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle  HMMWV, or Humvee) tooling around in the suburbs, begging attention in its mostly-useless incarnation, carrying with them the memory of hundreds of U.S. soldiers being killed in them. I just don't like the idea of desensitizing the imagery of these vehicles into something sugary. 

When the Words Feel Like the Bad Paper They're Written On--Trashing Frederick Douglass (1895)

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1895 was a great big year in science--there were major contributions by Cantor, Poincare, Ramsay, and Perrin, among others, though the biggest of them all was the semi-accidental discovery by Roentgen of X-rays, a monument in the pursuit of further/deeper.

My own little 1895 discovery last night may be a well-established bit but was unknown to me, and it proved to be the opposite of further/deeper. I was trying to squeeze some life out of what looked like a pamphlet as dry and brittle as the bad newsprint it was made of:  History of the General Assembly of North Carolina, January 9-March 15, 1895, Inclusive (printed by E.M. Uzzell in Raleigh, 1895), which sounds just flat-out anti-interesting (especially with the very specialized time period).  It turns out that the 160-page work is written in a easy, journalismo sub-Menckian way, with a nod to humor here and there and a dose of familiarity, a good narrative style that was useful and breezy.

And as I hunted for some sparkly point in the daily comings and goings of the legislature, I ran right into the dark void.

The hole was a short report, “The Douglass Infamy”, which was an infamy of its own. Over the few pages of the article/review it discussed the  “humiliation of the white people of the south” caused by the General Assembly of the legislature choosing to suspend and adjourn their meeting out of respect  for Frederick Douglass, who had suddenly died during the session. The author referred to the action as "an offense against the dignity and sentiments of this proud State" ("State" is capitalized, "Negro" is not),  Douglass to as “the miscegentionist" straight-away after condemning the act of respect due the man, and was an "...author of many malignant and untruthful aspersions on the whites",  and referred to his as "an inferior race, incapable of civilization except for that under the whites".  Closing down the government was a "humiliation to white people" and disgusted some legislators to the point where they denied that the action had taken place. I think this was because it elevated Douglass to a level of equality, which just would not do: "The whites of North Carolina...regard any approach by the Negro to social equality with...abhorence [sic]". 

The was a significant amount of hateful nonsense in this entry, railing against Douglass, who in their view wrote terrible untruths about white people and who was “also guilty of miscegenation”, having married a white woman.  

“Thoughtful Democrats who have looked beyond the present moment and who have preferred to bear such party ills as they had, if such there were, rather than fly to others they knew not of, predicted that the fusion with Republicans of any considerable number of those who were formerly Democrats meant Republican domination, and that Republican domination meant, in one form or another, negro [sic] domination. The Douglas incident reveals the animus of that party and is a menace of its aims. (After the official declaration of the Fusionists, the General Assembly did not adjourn in honor of the birthday of Robert E. Lee, a legal holiday, but did adjourn out of respect for the memory of Frederick Douglas.)”

Finding this article was not surprising, really, though it was unexpected to some degree; there were a few other bits in the pamphlet similar to this, so the article did not stand alone. The part that is so amazing is that it the "Douglass Infamy" was just part and parcel of a documentary and interpretive  report on the action of the state legislature for a few months in 1895; and yet, there was this hateful business, taking up as much space and brain waves as noting that it was a cloudy day.  

Massive Paper Coronary for the Coroner’s Office of NYC, 1915

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If you ever had any interest—known and unknown—in reading about very impressive amounts of corruption and its constituents in the coroner’s office for NYC 104 years ago, here’s your chance to satisfy it. I’ve found a scarce report documenting the extraordinary conditions of that agency and also found a copy of it online, and include a link to the report (below).

You don’t want to be on the other end of this paper—it is scathing, and angry, and well-written and documented. From a quick read of it the office of the coroner of NYC was simply a fantastic mess of incompetent work and very highly competent corruption.

The report starts at the end, with a summary of findings, and then goes downhill from there:

• “The elective coroner in New York City represents a combination of power, obscurity and irresponsibility which has resulted in inefficiency and malfeasance in the administration of the office. With constant temptation and easy opportunity for favoritism and even extortion, with utter lack of supervision and control, and without the slightest preparation and training to create in the coroner's mind a scientific and professional interest in the performance of his duties, the present system could not have been better devised intentionally to render improbable, if not impossible, the honest and efficient performance of the important public function entrusted to his office.

Of the 65 men who have held the office of coroner since consolidation, not one was thoroughly qualified by training or experience for the adequate performance of his duties….”

There’s a ton of bitter accusation of wrongdoing along with the evidence to back it up. 

• Here’s the full text via Hathitrust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015055432580;view=2up;seq=4

A Not-So-Good Idea for Air Travel (1922)

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This October issue of Popular Mechanics 1922 is robust! Here's another attractive piece of design with loads of character and one central question:  "why?"  The image is that of a giant aeroplane capable of hauling 100 or more souls (not this particular version, though) for long distance uninterrupted flight of 1000 miles--so in order for there to be no in-between landings the aircraft came equipped with a glider aircraft (an altogether different version of the "hang glider") that was released for the mother ship. As you can see it is a much smaller aircraft and looks to me to be pretty well packed, leading no doubt to questionable utility and much prayer. The thing is, why bother with another aircraft when you can just stop the plane and let people off? This beast was half-stopped in the air anyway by modern standards, probably chugging away at, what, 100mph? (The airspeed record at this time was just a touch over 200mph.) and it wasn't flying very high (relative to even 1950), so stopping may not have been such a big deal. The airport or air station wouldn't've been an issue either, because the glider would near to land somewhere. Anyway, I just couldn't figure out this piece of The Possible Future.