JF Ptak Science Books

Demolition Tightrope Act with Pick Axe, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

There was a job to do in Chicago, and these men did it--how it all worked out safely accomplished, I do not know, because the episode is gut-wrenching just looking at the photo.  Not much can be said here except, "oh, wow". 

And for the record they are removing a wall from a mostly-demolished building, the last wall standing, built against its neighbor.  And what these guys did six stories up was swing a pickaxe to remove the wall beneath ,them, all the way down, brick-by-brick.  

[Image source: Popular Mechanics, August,, 1915, pg 323]

A Dominance of Observations from our Future Skeleton (1635)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2413

The poem asks some good and thoughtful questions that could lead a person to re-evaluate their self-centered existence, all the while mentioning "God" and the everlasting only  twice (though it does invoke the concept of "piety" up at  the very beginning and again at the end), so to me this strikes me as being a half-way morality-of-consumption consideration on the one hand and a plea for repentance for "new life, with endless glorie" on the other.   

This fine emblem book was found for me this morning by the wonderful Public Domain Review site. George Wither (1588-1667) published his book  A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne, Quickened with Metricall Illustrations, both Morall and Divine, and Disposed into Lotteries.... in 1635 in London by Henry Taunton, and engraved by William Marshall (1617-1650).  It is a lovely and surprising book, filled with sprinkled gems, not the least of which is the lottery-maker (referred to in the title), which we will come to below.  

The emblems were meant to be  striking metaphorical/allegorical images to spark ideas and reflection, and illustrated with a poem to make that process longer and deeper.  For example, consider the aspect of the death that awaits us all and how we live our lives:

 

In an odd occurrence of the word "overvaluing", the writer (and skeleton) asks us right away if we are "overvaluing so thy person, or the beauty of thy brow?" and "Why dost thou live in riotous excesse?" There are a few other provocative questions from and for the future ("Why so oppresse, and o'er thy fellow-Creatures, dominere?") delivered to us from us from our "fleshless raw bone thou shalt bee"--our skeleton seeing things clearly though its "sightlesse eye holes from within".  Mostly though what remains for us in the poem are admonitions/suggestions about what we might do with our time before we have none. For example, "of thy Proportion boast not and (for shame) repent thee of thy sinful vanity", and "renew thy spirit ere thy flesh decays".  There's a lot going on in the 36 lines of this poem, more so than you'd expect, and it certainly gives the reader something to think about as they slink towards their own exposed anatomies.  

The poem asks some good and thoughtful questions that could lead a person to re-evaluate their self-centered existence, all the while mentioning "God" and the everlasting only  twice (though it does invoke the concept of "piety" up at  the very beginning and again at the end), so to me this strikes me as being a half-way morality-of-consumption consideration on the one hand and a plea for repentance for "new life, with endless glorie" on the other.    

Now to one aspect of the "Lotteries" referred to in the title:  the book comes with its own chance-maker.  That is, at the very end there are two movable-paper circular calculators (volvelles, actually), paper disks made to turn one on top of the other, that the reader would move to select an emblem to read by chance:

and he text:

The book is segmented into four parts, with each section having about 50 emblems each, so the reader would determine which book they would go to by the direction of the wind or some other whimsy, and then choose the numbered emblem by turning the pointer on the larger dial, which would send them off to the found/appropriate emblem.  

Overall the book grows its own comparative form of "curious", and is an enjoyable read, and an uncommon one.  As the Public Domain Review points out, "Of Wither’s mostly forgotten literary talents the Scottish author and poet George Gilfillan wrote that “Wither was a man of real genius, but seems to have been partially insane”.  It happens.   

A Child's History of Writing and Books Writ Small, 1726

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

On Writing

[Images from John Comenius,  Orbis Senfualium Piélus: Omnium Principalium in Mundo Rerun/ &f m Vita Alопит,  translated as Pictura et Nomenclatur, the Visible World, or A Nomenclature, and Pictures of all Chief Things that are int he World, translated into English by Charles Hoof...1726.  See an earlier post here for more on Comenius. Image Source:  PROJECT GUTENBERG.]

The Ancients writ
in Tables done over with wax
with a brazen Poitrel, 1.
with the sharp end, 2. whereof
letters were engraven
and rubbed out again
with the broad end, 3.

Afterwards
they writ Letters
with a small Reed, 4.

We use a Goose-quill, 5.
the Stem, 6. of which
we make
with a Pen-knife, 7.
then we dip the Neb
in an Ink-horn, 8.
which is stopped
with a Stopple, 9.
and we put our Pens,
into a Pennar, 10.

We dry a Writing
13with Blotting-paper,
or Calis-sand
out of a Sand-box, 11.

And we indeed
write from the left hand
towards the right, 12.
the Hebrews
from the right hand
towards the left, 13.
the Chinese and other Indians,
from the top
downwards, 14.

 

Devastation and Capital

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

The history of exploration and capitalism and imperialism and conquest for much of its history is a fleshed-out skeleton based on misery and temptation and ruin. There are of course many images of he background to fortune of the beauty that hard-fought money has brought. It is interesting to look though at the scenes  when the wizards draw back the curtain to history, accidentally or not, even in such inauspicious locations as this pamphlet, a minor work on the rubber industry in Sumatra. 

The photograph of the decimated and routed forest is one of pride, ca. 1931-style, a mark of progress, development, industry, capital.

There were millions of acres under cultivation at this point, with (according to the figures quoted in the pamphlet) more than 320,000 workers/laborer-peasants doing the heavy lifting, the vast percentage of these being from China and Java.  There is also a mention of the worker agreements that would get them to Sumatra, noted as "penal sanctions"--the practice required people to work for three or five years and if they somehow forfeited that agreement they would be imprisoned and sentenced to further labor when released.  It was a vicious enterprise. 

But as strong as this was it must have undoubtedly been a manifestation of an even wider form of societal control, such as worker society existed there, living under the domination of the plantation owners.  

In any event the photograph on the cover was a prideful thing that today would be seen as usurious and representative of some deep tragedy. In short: nothing new. 

When a Non-Prediction Was and Wasn't a Prediction (1651-1666)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post
[Source: the City of London]

There was once a scrutable man who wrote a scrutable book with the description of a scrutable event that was actually a non-event of a scrutable happening. There was no problem with all of this--especially as it was lounging beneath layers of a Very Demanding Title--until one of the events  somewhat "foretold" by the author came to be true.  It could not have been a bigger deal unless the story had been about the king or queen, and maybe not even then.  The event was the catastrophic Great Fire of London, an extreme ravage that burned for four days in September 1666, and which ate up 13,000 houses and 87 parish churches.  

The event was predicted after a fashion by astrologer William Lilly (1602-1681) in his book Monarchy or No Monarchy, which was printed in 1651, fifteen years before the event.  Perhaps it might have attracted less notice to authorities had Lilly not written (and illustrated) what he thought to be the coming of a great plague in the same work--the plague struck London a year before the Fire.  

The Great Plague killed far more than the Great Fire, perhaps 100,00 or more with teh plague, and far fewer than that in the fire, though the fire did cause huge destruction. (It seems that casualty figures for the fire are indeterminate, from a few to hundreds to thousands.)  

So some central figures in government bade Mr. Lilly visit them soon after the fire, just to make sure that "England's Merlin" and the most popular astrologer of his day did not have an actual role in starting the fire. He didn't of course have anything to do with the fire, or the plague.  His predictions were cloudy enough to both mean something and nothing, part of the great anti-charm that is the heart and soul of all manner of  what James Randi calls "Whoo-whoo".  He was left to the rest of his life, which still had a fair bit of fame and social acclaim left to it, though most of that would slip away with the Restoration.  It turns out that a number of people predicted a great fire for London, which was not surprising given the way the city expanded and converted itself into a major metro area (of 500,000+ people) which was partially built on kindling.  

A Big Popular Statement on How Small Small Is (1883)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2259

In three issues¹ of Nature (London) magazine in 1883, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)--polymath of a great and inquisitive mind--tried to establish a good reference point for the size of atoms, mainly to establish that their size while being incredibly small were not unimaginably so, and that even objects of this minor magnitude could be approximated and studied.  And he did so with great ease and in a popular general-audience sort of way.

All told, this was a very good piece of thinking, especially referencing the estimates of Niels Bohr 30 years later, publishing in the Philosophical Magazine (volume 26, pp 1-25, 1913) and calculating the size of an atom at .5 x ^-10 meters. And even though Thomson is talking about his estimates in terms opf science in a post-Dalton and post-Mendeleyeev world, he is also pre-Stoney, and Roentgen and Curie and Soddy and everyone else, especially pre-atomic-nucleus, and pre-proton (1919/20 with Rutherford and Moseley) and pre-neutron (Chadwick 1932), which are smaller still than the atom. Way smaller.  It is difficult to put into understandable terms on how "small" that small is:  the atomic nucleus is sort of 1/10,000th of the atom, and a proton or neutron smaller still, and then the quark smaller than that, until perhaps it becomes a Seussian exercise with future discoveries showing that after everything is said and done that it is turtles all the way down.  

But Thomson managed to put an understandable assessment on a very difficult visualization, talking in terms of an atom being "1/10,000,000 or from 1/10,000,000 to 1/100,000,000 of a centimetre in diameter", or 1x10-⁷meters, which is just about the size of a cell nucleus or DNA; that's in the neighborhood, especially if you look at the smaller number which is 10^-8 meters, which starts to close in on the size of the massive carbon atom (10^-10), but sorta not so close to the electron (10^-12) , or carbon atom nucleus (10^-14) or proton (10^-15).  Small, hazy stuff indeed, filled with nothing.  On the other hand, if you proceeded in a space vehicle 10¹⁴ meters from Earth our Solar System would appear as just another fuzzy splotch in the sky.  10¹⁶ meters is about a light year, and then it would taken 10,000 of those "just" to get slightly outside our galaxy.  And then there's the rest.  

In any event, Thomson did okay. And as it turns out (as I just now learned) there was an earlier Nature article in 1870 (the inaugural year of the journal) by its editor Norman Lockyer who estimated the size of atoms at just about the Thomson scale.  

"FOUR lines of argument founded on observation have 
led to the conclusion that atoms or molecules are 
not inconceivably, not immeasurably small. I u;e the 
words " inconceivably" and "immeasurably" advisedly. 
That which is measurable is not inconceivable, and there- 
fore the two words put together constitute a tautology. 
We leave inconceivableness in fact to metaphysicians. 
Nothing that we can measure is inconceivably large or 
inconceivably small in physical science. It may be diffi- 
cult to understand the numbers expressing the magnitude, 
but whether it be very large or very small there is nothing 
inconceivable in the nature of the thing because of its 
greatness or smallness, or in our views and appreciation 
and numerical expression of the magnitude. The general 
result of the four lines of reasoning to which I have re- 
ferred, founded respectively on the undulatory theory of 
light, on the phenomena of contact electricity, on capil- 
lary attraction, and on the kinetic theory of gases, agrees 
in showing that the atoms or molecules of ordinary matter 
must be something like the 1/10,000,000, or from the 
1/10,000 000 to the 1/100000,000 of a centimetre in dia- 
meter."--Thomson, below. 

Notes:

1. William Thomson,  The Size of Atoms, I pp 203-205, June 28, 1883; Size of Atoms II, pp 250-254, July 12, 1883; Size of Atoms III, pp 274-278, July 19, 1883, earlier presented before the Royal Institution, beginning February 2, 1883.

How to be a Hobo (1946)

JF Ptak Science Books

Hobo Exposed, or How to be a Hobo, a pamphlet  with no claim for a writer but copyrighted by "Kelly's Specialities" in 1946,  is dedicated to Sun Down Slim, Boston Blackie, Sticks Red and Commissary Blackie. It gets right to the point of my principal interest in the work, the Hobo Slanguage.  The collection here is not quite as road-elegant as other collections from the Hobo Kings--not that it is less "regal", just more common and less imaginative. 

For example, "Wingey" is the name for a hobo without an arm; "Sticks" is a tramp who sues a crutch; "Legs", well, you know.  On the other hand I find "grouch bag" (which was a bag of Bull Durham tobacco worn around the neck, which was either valuable enough to be worn that way to keep people out of your pockets or you just didn't have any pockets), "hogger" (a railroad engineer), "dice box" ( a large discarded merchandise box to sleep in), "slippins" (gravy), "canned heater" (an unfortunate tramp who drinks sterno), "Jingle Buzzard" (a tramp who begs food from other tramps), the "lump bum" (a hobo who bums food and stuff from another hobo), the "chuck bum" (as above but bumming meat), the "mush faker" (who counterfeited laundry soap and sold greasy/fat white powder-like material door-to-door,  and so on.

There are many others--here's a further sample:

 There are useful bits beyond the Hobo lingo--essentially this is what the pamphlet is really all about.  There is info on how to jump a train moving 10 mph, what train lantern arms and signal whistles meant, how to make your own bed down ("glim"), the best use of newspapers in keeping warm and sanitary, and other such interesting ideas.

The author figures that to start tramping you should go hungry for three days, and get plenty hungry, and then the following ten days, half-hungry.  After two weeks you should have your pride behind you...and you will be on your way to full-fledged trampdom..."

Bad Poetry Yields Good Results in the Celebration of the "Atom-Molecule", 1874

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Browsing  the 1874 volume of the London Punch an interesting but truly bad poem slid from the page. The poem certainly suffers from itself, but there are interesting insights, and poetics aside there's some good thinking going on in spite of a probably-very-quick composition time.

For example, the first line of this stanza "In this autoplastic archetype of Protean protein lay" is a real tooth-popper, but it does dig down into some interesting turf:

All the humans Space has room for, or for whom Time makes a day,
From the Sage whose words of wisdom Prince or Parliament obey,
To the Parrots who but prattle, and the Asses who but bray–
      So full was this Atom-Molecule,
      Of the young World’s proto-prime!

The poem wobbles and wrangles within its own very tight and bumpy twists ("  Of the young world’s proto-prime!") though the essence of existence does seep through:

In it slept all the forces in our cosmos that run rife,
To stir Creation’s giants or its microscopic life;
Harmonious in discord, and cooperant in strife,
To this small cell committed, the World lived with his Wife–
      In this fine old Atom-Molecule,
      Of the young world’s proto-prime!

It is a curious work which I liked in the end, or at least I liked it as a vehicle to get you to another place: 

In it Order grew from Chaos, Light out of Darkness shined,
Design sprang up by Accident, Law’s rule from Hazard blind,
The Soul-less Soul evolving–against, not after, kind–
As the Life-less Life developed, and the Mind-less ripened Mind,
      In this fine old Atom-Molecule,
      Of the young World’s proto-prime.

 

A Note on Sharp Turns

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

THere is just something very offputting about sharp turns made by unusual things in unnatural settings, a sort of unwanted geometry applied to unneccesary objects found in cringing and chaffing places. 

For example--this image of a ship steaming in for a roudn of reapirs as though it was coming into a first-decade strip mall seems to have a frightful sesnse of wrongness to it.  Not to mention that it seems a little impossible for the ship to have made those four turns to get in/out of the "car park". 

[Source: W.H. THomspon, Devon. A Survey of its Coast, Moors, and Rivers with some Suggestions for their Preservation, London, 1922.]

This reminds me very much of an earlier sharp turn found in an 1875 engineer's drawing ("Plan of Ten-Stall Stable....for W.D. Wight's paper on Underground Horses")--and yes indeed these were horses kept underground, used for hauling the heavier wagons (on tracks) of whatever, brought out to these larger chambers by men doing the same work with lighter loads in smaller areas.  (There's more on this in an earlier post on this blog, here.)

Obviously there is nothing but everything else in the very wide world of the history of sharp turns--these two just happened to come together fo rme, and looked very similar in their own ways. 

 

Unusual Jobs Department: Gum Scrapers of 1916

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

In the long term, there are no unusual jobs-- it is only the labeling of the action that makes it "unusual", especially when it comes to something like a paid occupation, and that the "payment" part is supporting someone's life.  (Some jobs are harder than others, and then there are jobs harder than almost all others, and then there are the jobs that may be the hardest--and that is a completely different story from being "odd". See this old post "The Worst Job of the 19th Century? Tongue-Pullers, Nipple-Pinchers & Anal Tobacco Blowers Try to Revive the Dead", here.)

I remember  thinking this precise thought about oddness when walking through the airport in Helsinki somewhere in the past and seeing an old woman on her hands and knees scrubbing away at the tile of the large concourse with a small brush.  It was "odd" for a moment, and then not so. She was diligently working at her job, and her job just happened to be on her hands and knees. (And in my opinion that is really the only way to clean a floor--the walking around with a mop or fancy hardwood cleaning machine just won't do.)

Which brings me to this article on Minneapolis' George White, who was a professional bubble gum scaper. "White chases the trodden sticky pellets ["quids'] from morning to night" says the writer of Illustrated World's "Little Oddities of Life" columnist in their August 1916 issue. 

Mr. White took his job seriously, devising his own solutions to loosen the gum, and his own brush. 

And of course he wore a cap. 

Just because someone is a scraper doesn't make them a scrapper--not that there's anything wrong with that, either.

A Remarkable Confederate POW Newspaper, 1865

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2060    

[My thanks to Rebecca Onion at Slate Vault for finding and surfacing this incredible document]

"One of the most remarkable productions of Fort Delaware was the Prison Times, a newspaper published in April, 1865, by Capt. Geo. S. Thomas, 64th Georgia Regiment, and Lieut. A. Harris, 32d Florida. It was written in a small but very clear handwriting by Capt. J. W. Hibbs, of the 13th Virginia Cavalry [sic], who proved himself a most expert penman." --from Edward R. Rich, Comrades! page 120, a small but dense 167-page book printed in Easton, Maryland, and published by S.E. Whitman, in1898, containing his recollections of his experiences in the Union prison.

[Source: the Library of Congress, here.]

The Prison Times was a hand-written, four-page newspaper produced by Confederate prisoners in April 1865 in the Union prison at Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River.  It was a short lived effort, the war ending just weeks after the paper appeared¹. As a matter of fact the editors hoped that the newspaper effort would not have to last very much longer, longing for the end of the war and to return home:

"Trusting that the difficulties of conducting an enterprise of this kind under the circumstances are duly appreciated by an intelligent public, we send forth this our first number hoping that ere we can have time to issue many numbers our prison times will be discontinued forever and our patrons and ourselves be far away in our loved Sunny South."

It is a remarkable document, enlisting the hope for normalcy of the 33,000 (or so) prisoners².  The newspaper made a statement of intent (and to avoid political discussion), and displayed useful information like barracks directors and a short piece on "our prison world".  There were also interesting short advertisements which were apparently real:  folks placed their services into play in the newspaper for engraving, jewelry (rings, chains, gutta percha), tailoring, washing & ironing, barbers, dental, music instructions, and shoe-making.  There were also a few short notices for debating and chess clubs, as well as a few pieces of poetry.  Overall, there was a lot of information packed into four 12x8" pages, an effort that showed that in this town-sized prison that there were definitely some forms of society and commerce taking place.     

A Work of High Beauty--an Architecture of Thought, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post 

I don't often have a chance to purchase manuscripts by significant scientists in their edited state, back from the journal to which they were being submitted.  This is the case with the material below, a paper written by Dr. Hans J. Reissner in 1944. It is a remarkable thing to look at, a precise and elegant archaeology of thinking, a sort of synesthesic display of thinking on different levels.  It is a beautiful thing:

[Hans J. Reissner (1874-1967) was a leading German pioneer in aeronautics and aeronautical engineering and mathematical physics. He was appointed to the chair vacated by Arnold Sommerfeld at the Technische Hochschul at Aachen, where he established the aerodynamics laboratory and designed the great experimental wind tunnel at Aachen where he was the second director (after T. von Karman). He went on to the University of Berlin where he remained until 1938, when he left Germany for the United States. Reissner held a chair at the Illinois Institute of Technology and in 1944 joined the faculty at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.  Van Karman spoke very highly of Reissner and attributed his work in aerodynamics to be as important as those advances made by Prandtl (see von Karman’s Wind and Beyond). Reissner was also celebrated with two anniversary volumes of Applied MAthematiics for his 60th and 75th birthdays (in 1934 and 1949).]

A History of Antiquarian Water: Line Segments

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2022

Images of rivers and oceans in 16th century maps can be beautifully-rendered objects.  Water can appear as lines thick and languid, curling and wavy, sparse, tentative, adventurous, willing, dashed, timid.  Cold. Mostly cold, and full of loneliness and foreboding.  And sometimes the sea is just a blank--it is more common to see blank skies in engravings and woodcuts before, say, the 1540's, but the blankness is usually covered by rhumb lines and compass roses and lines of longitude and latitude, compared to the blankness of blank skies, where there is usually nothing to spare us from the blank.

Today I'd like to have a look at the strong and long lines delineating activity in water as the first part of a short series of posts looking at the design of the representation of water by lines.  Then, when the lines are done, we'll take a look at dots. 

This example occurs in Masuccio Salernitano's (Tommaso Guadati, fl. c. 1476) Novellino, published in Venice by Bartholomeo Zanni in 1510, a tall book of a Decameron-ish flavor, with 50 stories told in five sections, mostly of a waning erotic nature.  The lines here are long and very languid. I also like the face in the window. 

This complex of lines illustrates the map of Africa found in Montalboddo Fracan's Itinerarium Portugallensium, which was about the earliest published collection of Spanish and Portugese travel and exploration relating to the New World.  The work was exceptional and very significant--and very popular, going through fifteen editions in 22 years to 1528. 

Titus Livius (59 BCE-17 ACE), better known to the English-speaking world as Livy, was a superior among superiors of Roman historians, writing on the history of his city and country.  His work, Romische Historie…,published in Mainz by Johann Schoeffler 1450 years later in 1514, was one of the most beautifully illustrated books ever produced in that city. This is a considerable statement, as Mainz was the birthplace/hotbed of moveable type printing, being home to Johann Gutenberg and a number of other early presses. 

One of the most famous printed water scenes is from the (numerous) editions of Christopher Columbus' letter describing his voyage to the New World. It was written (or at least finished)  soon after his arrival in Lisbon 4 May 1493, almost exactly 520 years ago, and quickly found its way into print. This image (depicting Hispaniola and Isabella) was printed in Basel in 1494, and served to illustrate the somewhat hopeful and inflated description of what he found on his new voyage.

[Source: Wiki, here.]

This image from the mid-16th century is found in the fantastic work on the history of Scandanavia (and etc.) in Olaus Magnus' Histotria di gentibus septentrionale ("History of the Northern Peoples", 1555).

[Image source: http://www.avrosys.nu/prints/index.htm]

The seas in the map of the Western Hemisphere in Joannes de Stobnicza's Introductio in Ptholemei Cosmographium (Cracow, 1512, and widely believed to be copied or at least very heavily inspired by the Martin Waldseemueller's 1507 map of the world) are very tightly drawn, neatly unifrom, and lovely, as wesee below).  This recitation could go on for quite some time, but this gets the point across on heavy lines.  Next stop: dots. 

Found Art in Antique Books and Writing to the Future, 1808

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

• "These leaves were cut out by my predecesor and put/ in by me.  D.H. Clark, January 20, 1808",  detail, inscribed on page 29 of Simson's Elements, 1808.

There was a leaf missing in Mr. Clark's book--the leaf for page 27/28--some of which he salvaged and placed back into the book on tabs, which you can see at the side of the book.  He also did not want to have any future owner of this book to think ill of him for having disfigured it.

The text is by Dr. Robert Simson, and called Elements of the Conic Sections, and was printed in New York in 1804. It was owned at some earlier point by Joseph Cheetham ("Princeton"), and then by L(ewis) D. Bevier ("bought of Cheetham") and then probably by Clark. They were all at Princeton College, and all associated with the bachelor of arts class of 1806 (though Cheetham seems to have graduated some years later). 

I am the owner of the book today, some 200 years later, and I hear Mr. Clark.  Somehow the page got loose Mr. Clark put it back. The end. 

There is also a bit of found poetry in that bit of text:

Being equal to

therefore

the circles, and

the square rectangle

therefore

are.

Dr. Johnson's Definition of Letters, A-Z

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  #426

I hear Jeremy Brett--as the ultimate Sherlock Holmes--reading this in my head.

The energy of Dr. Johnson must have been heroic--had to have been.  In addition to all of his other work, he sat down and wrote a dictionary--the first of its kind for the English language: A Dictionary of the English Language, which was printed in 1755.

I've collected what he had to say about the letters of the alphabet, which is in itself a small and remarkable thing of sweep and brevity.  He sites the "labial" P, the "canine "R", the unhappy hissing of S, the "note of aspiration" in H, and so on, in a forceful march to recording the language.  His book is a work of high beauty. 

All of the material below comes from the JohnsonDictionaryOnline site, here.

~ A ~

A, The first letter of the European alphabets, has, in the English language, three different sounds, which may be termed the broad, open, and slender.

The broad sound resembling that of the German a is found, in many of our monosyllables, as all, wall, malt, falt; in which a is pronounced as au in cause, or aw in law. Many of these words were anciently written with au, as sault, waulk; which happens to be still retained in fault. This
was probably the ancient sound of the Saxons, since it is almost uniformly preserved in the rustic pronunciation, and the Northern dialects, as maun for man, haund for hand.