JF Ptak Science Books

The First Photo Inside of the Information Revolution--the Transistor, 1949

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1370

One of the things I love about working my way through old scientific journals is when I find the issue that I'm looking for and scroll down the list of contributors to find the significant article that I want.  Long list, usually; and then, after making my way through 30 or 40 lines of tight type of the index I find it. [This by the way is one of those experiences that is being replaced by the digital library.]   Even though the paper on pp 1208 through 1226  of the 15 April 1949 issue of The Physical Review looks like any other, it is today seen as revolutionary. The entry for "Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action" by John Bardeen (two-time Nobel in physics) and Walter Brattain (Nobel '72) shows up about halfway down the index, sandwiched in some very good company (Enrico Fermi's "Origins of Cosmic Radiation" and a number of others), and does not show up bolded, or highlighted, or with an asterisk.  Such is the nature of publication in the academic journal world, everything delivered with equal weight. (The original publication is available for purchase here at our blog blookstore.)

It makes me wonder though how it would've felt to open this journal for the first time back there in mid-April '49, turning to page 1210 to see the microphotograph of the cutaway of a model of the transistor.  This was the defining technical publication on the transistor¹, which was the first massive step towards microminiaturization and the explosive new growth in the computer, allowing far more powerful machines to be designed in far less space, in far less amounts of time, and on and on.  It is one of the first steps in the Information Revolution, moving the computer from massive racks of electronic tubes to more simple, elegant, nimble and by-far faster circuit boards with transistors (and resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, etc.) to make an electronic circuit.  This would be the standard for computer construction, only supplemented by Jack Kilby (TI)  and Robert Noyce (Fairchild Camera) in 1958/9 with the integrated circuit, where transistors are made smaller still and produced in groups on circuit boards rather than individually.

The photo above shows a cutaway of the transistor, and is the first time it was published--the first photo of what was one of teh 20th century's greatest inventions. 

Notes

1.  The paper was published simultaneously in the Bell System Technical Journal; Bardeen and Brattain were with the Bell Labs.  The Bell journal also contained another revolutionary paper in the same volume, Claude Shannon's "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", which is one of the most important early papers on electronics and cryptology.  (We also have a copy of this classic paper for sale at our blog bookstore site.)

An X-Ray of Cubism? Jouffret and Visualizing the Fourth Dimension, 1903 and 1906.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1361

Is this an X-Ray of Cubism?

Emile Jouffret brought an amazing and lovely pair of books to the mathematical dining table, both coming at about the mid-point of a period of perhaps the most sweeping multidisciplinary revolutions in human history.  Published in 1903¹ and 1906² [and both originals available at our blog bookstore] they both may have had an impact as a visualization tool for the newest movement in art since the creation of Impressionism (1850's-1870's): Braque and Picasso's  Cubism. When you compare the illustrations in the Jouffret books you cannot help but to see a connection to the work of (the morally-lonely) Picasso (and especially in his 1910 portrait of the movement-molding art dealer Ambroise Vollard, below). Georges Braque and the that the two would make in 1906, the first year of the Cubist movement. 

Jouffret's 1903 book was hardly the first on the topic, though it may be the first of the major, book-length treatments of the topic, as well as the most  heavily illustrated.  Thinking on the fourth dimension goes back as far as Kant, at least, and the real work begins in the first half of the 19th century.

The first major³ work arrives with Hermann Grassmann's "Die Lineale Ausdehnungdlehre" (Theory of Linear Extensions) in 1844 (and the subsequent translations of the work as well as original work by Arthur Cayley); followed by Ludwig Shclafli (1814-1895) "Theorie der vier flachen...." (Theory of Continuous Manifolds, 1852 but not published until 1906), Riemann's 1854 speech (which was not published until 1867 and which appeared translated by William Kingdom Clifford in Nature in 1873, G.F. Rodwells "On Space of Four Dimensions" (Nature, May 1873),  Dodgson/Carroll's  Through the Looking Glass (1872) deep references, Zollner "On Space of Four Dimensions" 

(April 1878 and subsequent publications, and who is referenced in Kandinsky's [difficult -to-me On the Spiritual in Art of 1912), W.I. Stringham (1847-1909) "Regular Figures in n-Dimensional Space" (American Journal of Mathematics, 1880), and E.A. Hamilton Gordon, "Fourth Dimension", April 1887, to name some of the major figures.  And then of course comes Edwin Abbott's Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, by a Square (1884) and Charles Howard Hinton, who published a number of different works beginning in 1880 ("What is the Fourth Dimension?", 1880 plus Scientific Romances 1884, and The Fourth Dimension, 1904) and lasting through the turn of the century.  There is also H.G. Wells, whose The Time Machine began to appear in parts as early as  1894, though it did appear in the same issue of the  Science Schools Journal as the Hamilton Gordon article, in April 1887, as the "Chronic Argonauts"). Wells' also approaches the fourth dimension in "The Plattner Story", in 1896 and The Invisible Man in 1897. Other literary contemporaries of Wells who used the fourth dimension in their work include Oscar Wilde ("The Canterville Ghost", 1891), George Macdonald (Lilith, 1895), and Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Hueffer The Inheritors, (1901)--the most convincing and scientific of all of these literary efforts though lies with Wells. From about this point on--from the time that Jouffret enters the scene in 1903--the fourth dimension has become part of the culture, and a popular culture at that...especially after the Cubists begin their assault on visual representation in about  1906.

The Jouffret books are beautiful, and very interesting--they would have been better served with a bibliography, which would have been very nice to have--that said, Jouffret does have a fair number of footnotes to earlier work, so it is not as though his work is without attribution.  But it is a very interesting adventure. (Just a note--the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometries would get their first bibliography in D.M.Y. Sommerville's classic  Bibliography of Non-Euclidean Geometry in 1911, which is a must-have for all of those interested in this topic...it is massively packed with all manner of major and minor works as well as obscuriana.  It is not, unfortunately, annotated.)

1. Jouffret, E.  Traite Elementaire de Geometrie a Quartre Dimensions et Introduction a la Geometrie a n-Dimensions. 

2.  Jouffret. Melanges de Geometrie a Quatre Dimensions.  Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1906.  220pp.

3. Most of the data in this long and winding sentence has been culled from Linda Dalrymple Henderson's terrific The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton, 1983--most of my references come from the first 45 pages or so of her book, which is the Bible of all modern works on the fourth dimension/math/physics/art.

Beautiful Technical Shadowing, 1880

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This superb engraving, "Examples of Finished Shading, Locomotive Wheels" (source unknown) was engraved by J.W. Lowry after the original of C.J. Wallis, and published by Blackie & Son of Edinburgh and London around the year 1880.  The work is detailed yet spare, heavy yet elegrant, beautiful, and of course perfectly shadowed.  Splendid. The details (above and below) could be almost anything, but the first does have a certain pull of the 18th century masters of Fench visionary architects (Boullee, Leduc & co.) to it. The full engraving (which is available at our blog bookstore) is follows the following.

And the full engraving:

 

Proust Suits and Pressurized Cabins

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If I put my literary specs on and do a little free-association,  what I see in these two figures is a Proustian thing, characters in search of time, freezing time, preserving it. Time, and everything else, everything that can be associated with a human experience captured and recaptured, recirculated, resuscitated, replayed, re-envisioned, remembered, recognized, over and over again.  Kind of like a memory hell, in a way, only in Proust's hands it all sounds and tastes so beautiful. Another peek without those wicked mega-specs and I see two robots from a pulsing Disney film, actions in search of characters--the possibilities are endless, particularly if you develop a little narrative. The real story of what is happening here is complex version of a simpler solution.

And the key to it all: hypoxia.

But I can't leave this without at least a mention of Raoul Hausmann, whose "Self Portrait of a Dadasoph" is related to this line of collecting consciousnesses:

When this next image was published in the Illustrated London News in October 1936 the practical application of tropospheric flight was just about a reality.  I should really say “popular” more so than “practical”.  It presented two approaches to a looming problem in the progress of aviation–reaching altitudes in excess of 10,000 feet begins to present a host of problems to the passenger of that aircraft.  The solution was to combat the pressures of high altitude flight, one of which was to pressurize each passenger and crew member in their own “space suit”.  The combination of the artist G.H. Davis¹ and the technical assistant compared this solution to the problem with a more simple and elegant solution.

And that was relatively simple, at least in thought experiments: rather than pressure everyone individually, you could place everyone in a pressurized environment within the aircraft.  And this is the point that the artist/techie make–earlier engineers came up with simple solutions to traveling at high altitudes–they just weren’t simple enough.  And compared with the better design, the initial, simple, designs look a little monstrous.
                               
Notes:

1. I include Mr. Davis as an iconic figure in the history of 20th century technical illustration–he has been featured on this blog many times.

WWII Aircraft Cross Sections--the Schematics Work of G.H. Davis

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sI'm sharing some of the collectrion here of the published work of George.H. Davis (1881-1963), the prolific and vastly accomplished artist for The Illustrated London News. His work with that magazine for the forty or so years that I am familiar with is superb, and his great strengths can be found in rendering technical cross sections and infographics.  He had a great sense of design and a very fine hand, and so far as I can tell he displayed an excellent control of his subject, thousands and thousands of times (2,500 times, according to Mr. Davis).

Here are some fabulous examples of technological cross sections of WWII aircraft by Davis--the drawings are just superb, and you can easily get lost in them, following the geogrpahy of engineering detail from one logical place to the next.

Blohm u. Voss BV141

This is the Blohm u. Voss "BV 141"a very unusual-looking aircraft, and it appeared in The Illustrated London News for 23 May 1942, and it gives an excellent view of what the editors called "a lop-sided freak".  Perhaps the editors of the ILN wanted to educate its readers on the plane since it was supposed to be widely employed on the Russian Front, though it looks like only 38 were ever built (and none survive today). Actually, the plane, designed by Dr. Richard Vogt (1894-1979),  was a high-flying three-seater  surveillance aircraft capable of 220 mph at 17,000 feet, powered by a single 1000 hp Bramo Fafnir 9-cylinder radial engine.  The idea for the design was to give the pilot and co-pilot a very wide field of view--and by this, I'm guessing that the field of view most affected and aided by this would be straight down. The rear gunner also had an enormous field of view. 

As it turns out Vogt survived the war and spent his Golden Years in the U.S., seven of them (1960-1966) with Boeing to evaluate hydrofoils and vertical liftoff systems:  he had built other odd planes during his career, and carried them with them into near-retirement, making this sort of design his metier.

"The Mustang--Fastest Army Co-operation in the World", appearing in The Illustrated London News for 12 December 1942. 

 The Spitfire:

 

A Do-It-Yourself Paper Digital Computer, 1959.

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This wonderful cut-away and paste-up template for a digital computer comes to us from the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, volume 2, issue 9 for September 1959.  The PAPAC-00 is a “2-register, 1-bit, fixed-instruction binary digital computer” and was submitted to the journal by Rollin P. Mayer (of the MIT Lincoln Lab).  There’s a hunk of me that wants to make this thing really big–cut out the individual pieces and then crash them out to 50" widths, pasted on found bits of cardboard packing from the neighborhood frame shop, and then piece the thing together as the world’s largest pre-1960 1-bit paper computer.  Or maybe not.  In any event I thought to share this with readers here who might actually print out these templates and try to construct the thing themselves–warning: you’ll need t be able to cut pins in order to make the model work properly. [The original paper may be purchased from our bookstore, here.] 


Mayer also wrote an interesting article on including children in the scope of the computer industry...in 1956–something I find to be a very early piece of thinking on Little Humans and Big Computing.  His abstract identifies the three main points of his paper: “(1) That the digital computing field needs, and will continue to need, not only more people who are capable of designing and programming digital computers, but more people who understand the basic limitations and potential uses of digital computers; (2) that the computer industry should take an active interest in providing a basic computer training to the largest number of people, in addition to more extensive training to those who show an interest in designing and programming computers; and (3) that the typical 12-year-old youngster has the interest, skill and basic knowledge necessary to build and understand simple working models of practically anything”. –“A proposal for training youngsters in digital computing techniques” in Proceeding ACM '56 Proceedings of the 1956 11th Annual Meeting.

Lastly I should also mention that in this same monthly issue (which ranged all of 52 pages) was an article by Julien Green, “Remarks on ALGOL and Symbol Manipulation”, a three-page paper that comes from the near-dawn of the ALGOL (short for ALGOrithmic Language). (It can be argued that the beginnings of ALGOL were about 1955, but for the sake of simplicity here I’ll note that the first committee appointed to study the matter for the ACM was in September, 1957, and the first group to formalize it met at the ETH Zurich in 1958, producing the language’s first version, known as ALGOL 58.  Julien Green was a member of the 13-person panel that created the ALGOL 60that met in Paris in January 1960.   And so the Green paper did appear within the first few years of institutional study in America, and it was written by one of the six American members of the ALGOL 60 team.)

WWII Aircraft Cross Sections--Spitfire, Hurricane, Beaufighter, Lancaster (!) and Stirling.

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Here are some fabulous examples of technological cross sections from the collection here--this part concenrtrating on some of the British WWII aricraft.  The drawings are just superb, and you can easily get lost in them, following the geogrpahy of engineering detail from one logical place to the next. All of these images were published in The Illustrated London News and appeared 1940-1943.

And the detail (sorry for that--the originals are much larger than the scanning bed would allow...)

Human Bombs, part II: the Ohka and Jinrai Butai, 1944/5

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My favorite mid-century illustrator–G.H. Davis of the Illustrated London News–has provided yet another remarkably clear and well-designed series of images on a difficult topic for a main-line popular audience.  This time (appearing as a two-page spread on 28 July 1945 in the ILN) showed the structure, strategy and deployment of one of the late war’s

most feared weapons–the jet-powered human bomb of the Japanese naval air force. (In practice though the weapon didn’t produce that must damage though it did produce the fear: “the operational record  includes three ships sunk or damaged beyond repair and three other ships with significant damage; seven US ships were damaged or sunk by Ohkas throughout the war”¹).  The Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka was a purposefully designed and built rocket powered suicide rocket whose sole purpose was to attack and destroy ships. They were first produced in 1944 as unpowered glider aircraft, and then later in November 1944 the rocket propulsion system was added.  All tolled, the Yokosuka and the Kasumigaura Naval Air Arsenal together built about 850 of them–fewer than 3 dozen survived.

It was a relatively simple construction and was easily deployed: dropped from a bomber it would glide until near it target and then the rockets would be ignited, powering the thing to a near-unstoppable 500+mph, sending it, its pilot and the 2,300 lb ammonal warhead (an explosive made up of ammonium nitrate, trinitrotoluene (TNT), and aluminum  powder) into its target, detonating on impact.
                                   

Bad Places to Be Dept., #1:Fighting Underground in Sub-Trench Warfare, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 922

"Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.

Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.
Hear them calling you and me,
Every Son of Liberty.
Hurry right away, no delay, go today.
Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad.
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy's in line."
--Opening of George M. Cohan's "Over There"

It is difficult to think of soldiers fighting one another across hedgerows or trenches, hiding behind earth, creating a death-vacuum on the land in between--but worse yet would be fighting in these scenarios underground. 

Finding this large double-page illustration in The Illustrated London News¹gave me a physical reaction like the one I get when thinking about the discarded  Dalton Trumbo’s²  anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun.  The novel’s main character (Joe Bonham) is virtually encased in his own mind, having lost his arms, legs and face in an explosion on a WWI battlefield—the story is told from his bedridden perspective; dark, bandaged, alone, his mind and brain functioning, and with little means of communication or control over his body. .Among other obvious things, it makes me feel a peculiar stuffy coldness.  [The two sets of four images following should be viewed as two-parts of one long image, the bottom part being on the right.]

And so too when I look at these soldiers tunneling under a dead battlefield, working their way slowly—a foot an hour—towards the enemy trenches, desperately trying to blow a hole in an immovable object resistant to infantry and artillery.  The soldiers—sappers—were sent in to do a job that could no longer be accomplished above the ground.

This sort of warfare is extremely old, though the name is not, being about 150 years old. These soldiers were forward combat engineers, and had training across a number of different areas—they were responsible for many technical chores, like building (and blowing up) bridges, laying/clearing minefields, general demolition, defense construction, and, of course, fighting.  It could be a tremendously difficult job, unimaginable.

 

 

 

 

 

The “sapp” part of “sapper” comes from the French “sappe”, which refers to the other main part of their job during WWI, which was digging advancing trenches, a zigzag construction of a long horizontal half-hole which allowed an infantry force to slowly advance towards an enemy’s entrenched position. Another part was to tunnel under the enemy's lines, and then blow them to smithereeens so that a successful attack could be launched into the weakened position.

 

Here’s what I think about when I think about these men doing this job:  that two teams, British and German, start to tunnel towards each other’s lines, and somehow, in the middle of the battlefield, somehow manage to dig directly towards one another, their tunnels literally colliding.  Hand-to-hand combat through the opening connecting the two sapper tunnels, then gunfire.  Alerted, the artillery from each side zero-in on what is suspected to be the opening end of the tunnels, pummel them, destroying the access.  So now, both sets in what is now virtually one tunnel, are fighting in the dark.  Even though the topside is only two feet away, any hole would open into the killing zone, making it impossible to escape that way.  It would be a bad place to be.

 

Notes

1. The issue is 27 Feb 1915.  The illustration is entitled "They Sent us in front with a Fuse an' a Mine', Sapping and Mining Under the Enemy's Trenches". The first half of the title is from Kipling's "Sappers": They send us in front with a fuse an' a mine , To blow up the gates that are rushed by the Line...

2. Trumbo has an interesting history, to put it mildly. An old Communist, he once gave up his old associates to the FBI at the start of WWII--an act he later thought of as being stupid and wrong.  It also had the opposite effect for him--he thought he was being patriotic, but the FBI was more interested in him than his information.  He would get eaten up by McCarthyist operatives and denied HUAC any information on any of the famous "Hollywood Ten".  He got a year in jail and was blacklisted, booted out of LA. He came back--mostly under someone else's name (see the link above for his screenwriting credits, which are substantial)--and acknowledged shortly before he died.

Big Planes: Aircraft with Dining Rooms in Their Wings

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 906

Is it just me, or do the rest of you see Cary Grant at a teeny-tiny table when looking at this aircraft? There’s just something so horribly wonderful about the excesses washing over the passengers of high privilege in this airplane.[Source: The Illustrated London News 21 Dec 1929.] 

 

And the airplane has a name—Christmas, named for the man who provided its inspiration, Dr. William Whitney Christmas¹--and was a paper plan to produce the world’s largest airplane.

 

It would’ve been so by leaps and bounds.  The Christmas was to have a 262’ wingspan and a gross weight of 142,000 pounds at the time when one of the largest planes aloft—the Patrician Keystone K-78—had a wingspan of 86’ and carried 18 passenger, 2 pilots and an engineer. It also held the world’s record for hauling the heaviest payload, which for some reason was “33 girls”.  It was bigger still than the largest thing in the air, Lufthansa’s Dornier DO.X –this was an aircraft capable of moving 60-100 passengers (serviced by a crew of 10-14), a flying boat with 12 (Curtiss Conqueror 610hp) engines on wing sections 157’ long. (Was this a mile-a-minute fuel consumer?) The Dornier plane didn’t last long in service due to operating costs (1929 was a bad year to undertake an expense like this, especially in the hyperinflated Germany) and was in an aviation museum by 1934². (This plane—one of three constructed—was destroyed in a RAF bombing raid in 1943.)

Here’s something extraordinary about the Christmas:  it had a dining room (actually, a “dining saloon”) that took up 15% of the plane’s floor plan.  There was also the spacious smoking room, the crew and officer quarters, the machinist’s shop, engine room balconies (?), and of course the staterooms that seem to run along most of the front of the plane. The side elevation shows not very much space at all allotted to what must’ve been some massive engines, seeing as how there’s only two four-blade props. (The small lateral cross section shows two people against the plane for scale—these folks must’ve been giants; I figure they should be a little more than 75% of the manikins.  I make each prop blade to be about 10 foot (?))

As it turns out this aircraft looks a lot like Edmund Rumpler’s³ (1872-1940) giant.  Outfitted with a long row of staterooms along the front edge of the large wing and a huge dining room, it doesn’t seem to be equipped with an area for the engines.  Maybe this was an endemic flaw among older fast-thinkers…  

Notes:

1. Dr. Christmas (1865-1960) was the third American to fly and was the first to design a plane with aerilons.

2. Compare this to the Antev An-225, a modern very-,limited-production monster that could haul 1.3 million pounds of cargo, and the 747 (hauling up to 900,000 pounds) and the mammoth Airbus A380—all relatively the same size but with fabulous design and power.

3.Rumpler made very significant aeronautical contributions to the German effort in WWI, as well as designed the first aerodynamic auto—his military planes though during the war were  great triumph, partially because they were also Germany’s first mass-production-possible aircraft.  This didn’t help him much when Hitler came to power—being Jewish, Rumpler was arrested, and then released by Goering who at least could find a small part of himself to save this one Jew who served Germany so well.

4.  Source for the Rumpler image is the wonderful ModernMechanix site here.

 

Interesting comparison chart for big planes: [Source]

 

An X-Ray of the Earth, 1756

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I’m not sure why there was so much included in this engraving that had nothing to do with its subject matter.  The essential part of the image is the cross section at bottom:  the image of landforms, created by the man most responsible for the establishment of stratigraphy, the German physician/chemist/mineralogist/geologist Johann Gottlieb Lehmann (1719-1767).  What Lehmann accomplished was a sensational, x-ray-like interpretation of the surface of the earth, a privileged vision distant from the real birth of the science of geology in the work of James Hutton more than 50 years later. (Hutton was about the first to treat the entire corpus of the geology of the earth and which was also completely removed from myth and fable.  His work formed the basis for that of Charles Lyell who in turn provided some of the intellectual basis for Charles Darwin.)  He seems to be the first to create such a slice of the earth, illustrating an orderly, historical formation of the various layers (and not an unrelated jumble), and the first steps towards establishing the laws of formation of geological sequence.

Outside of the spectacular introduction to the workings of earth in this cross section, I’m taken by the enormous sky, and the very lonely compass, placed, seemingly haphazardly in a blank field, creating a very considerable blank space above the great discovery. The scientific greatness of the images aside (can I even say such a horrible thing?), the engraving looks to me like a modern surreal work. 

Book Note:  Lehmann, Johann. Versuch einer Geschichte von Flotz-Gebuergen,…1756, printed in Berlin .  “This unpretending treatise must be ranked as one of the classics of geological literature”—Archibald Geike

Cross Sections of a Mine Disaster at Wigan

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A few minutes after five in the afternoon on 24 August 1908, a terrific fire engulfed parts of the Cannell Mine of the Maypole Pit (of Pearson and Knowles Coal and Iron Company) just outside (famous¹) Wigan at Abram. It would claim the lives of 72 miners in a wicked, horrific way.    Part of the scene at the mine was covered by the great British weekly magazine The Illustrated London News (28 August 1908), and, though of course largely sympathetic, the article mentioned very little about the heroic attempts to save the lives of the trapped miners.  Perhaps the scene was just too gruesome, though not so for the Liverpool Mercury (22 August 1908), which reported the situation with more full detail, with less of an eye, perhaps, to ensuring that the mine could re-open, which may have been part of the reason for the ILN’s less detailed storyline.

I say this even though the ILN's story included some heart-rending images, including this (1890's) Stieglitz-like photograph of miners' wives waiting for word on the fate of their men.

The Mercury painted a pretty bad image:
 
“The explosion destroyed the ventilation drift and blew the cage, rope and other accessories away. It was officially stated that 75 men were down the pit at the time of the explosion, three were rescued alive, William DORAN, SMITH and DRAPER, thus there were 72 men in the mine immediately after the catastrophe.”

“Men, Women and children in a seething mass waited in sorrow at the pit mouth for those, who but, an hour before had left their homes. Rescue parties were organized without delay equipped with rescue apparatus from the new rescue station at Atherton.”

“When the rescue parties entered the mine they found it filled with gaseous fumes. Those who witnessed the awful debacle, stricken with terror at the spectacle, and their first impulse was to rush wildly in all directions, it was as if the end of the world had come.”

Evidently the rescue parties worked to 10 o’clock in the evening, reaching some 2500’ down into the mine before they were stopped by lethal gas.  Three men were found alive; 72 were found dead. 

1) Wigan is a town in Great Manchester; Wigan Pier, as in the great George Orwell work The Road to Wigan Pier (about the living and working conditions of the living and working poor).

Vision: Looking Straight Up, Down, Across and Through--1525-1905

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“Vision:  a device that belongs to those who have it. Far-reaching and fore-shortened, it is something that works best when used closely, loosely, finely and not at all. A gift-and-a-half and a half-a-bother.”  
The imagined Devil’s Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce

[See also my post Perspectives: Inside Looking Out, Outside Looking In]

 
 There is a small series of posts on this blog that deal with the perspective of looking at things straight-on:  straight up, straight down, straight across.  As it turns out, in my many years of looking at prints and images, view that look directly up and down are pretty uncommon.  Some of the earliest straight-on images actually offered a new vision to people who were so long accustomed to not looking at things in this way.

And for a long time it was just not possible, not really, to look straight down at something from a height, or at least until the invention of flight at the hands of the Montgolfier brothers in 1783.  This first image offers a view looking straight down from a balloon through a bank of clouds and onto a town, and was drawn and published in 1786.  It must have been shocking to see this for the first time in that year, the image so unexpected and mostly not imaginable.  One of the other aspects here is that the viewer is looking obliquely down from the tops of clouds, the first time that this was ever done—so far as I can determine—with a scientific vantage point. 

The seeming complement to this image is from Entretiens sur la Pluralitie de Mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds), written by the great French philosophe Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle in 1686 (just a year before publication of perhaps the greatest work in the history of science, Newton’s Principia Mathematica). The Plurality was a best-seller by the best-selling Fontenelle. An excellent attempt by a rather restricted writer to engage the population-at-large, writing a high-pop book on what was basically the history of astronomy and cosmology of the preceding century. Copernicus was a major feature of his imaginary conversations with a muse as he wandered through a metaphorical garden of questions, with the observations of Galileo and Cassini also very prominently featured. But what interests me here is the great similarity between the two, the view from the balloon looking down, and the Fontenelle, looking up.  (Or what would pass for “up” in space.)  Except that the cloud-y looking things in Fonetenelle aren’t clouds at all, but solar systems.  This was a radical, church-pounding idea at the tiem, displacing the unique centrality of the human condition, offering the possibilities of other lives on other solar systems and other planets

. 

Albrecht Durer's (1471-1528) drawing of a geometrical man was an amazing--startling, even--object to the early 16th century consciousness. His Underwysung der Messung ("Treatise on Measuring") written about 500 years ago (in 1525) set the stage for this next work--it is here that we find some of the most recognizable of Durer's illustrations of the instruments that he employed to do his perspective work:   his …Symmetria partium…humanorum corporum (1537) was a masterpiece, and a key piece of revolutionary visionary thinking.  Durer--so far as I can tell--created an orthographically rotating human figures in three-dimensional trapezoids, creating incredibly human-like non-human forms.  Supra-human, perhaps; mechanized, calculated, structural. His use of stereometry, the science of measuring volume, was adapted to this study of human form and the relationship between that and movement.

By doing this one could rotate the figures, pinch them, stretch them, and the proportions would remain exactly the same.

They were in a sense a CAT scan.  And in this way the person in 1525, seeing this for the first time, would be experiencing something like the sensation of seeing an X-Ray for the first time in 1895 or a magnified flea in 1626.  It was a spectacular effort an a major key to understanding movement, and anatomy, and of course map making.

This was a new way of thinking about the body, challenging the god-grace and ubiquitous church-inspired revelation of the body and how it worked.  This was not a necessarily easy time in which to picture humans in such a scientific way.  (In 1553 the physician and theological scholar Michael Severtus would be burned at the stake by John Calvin for his views on the Trinity, Nicean Creed and other related things, though his undeniably revolutionary idea of cardiopulmonary circulation was in itself a direct challenge to church teachings).

Durer’s innovation accommodated empirical observation and allowed for proportional change.  Its importance in relational drawing, anatomical and  technical, cannot be understated, which I think trumped it as a subversive agent to orthodoxy.

Fast forwarding a bit there are the images of arrested time by Etienne Marey (who was a technoid and physician) and  who was able to capture motion of all sorts--he was able to develop a picture so to speak of the movement of blood in the body via his instrument to calculate blood pressure, and he also created a shotgun-style camera that made the world's first high-speed photographs of movement.  And so it cane to pass that in the late 1870's and early 1880's people were instantly able to see what a horse looked like when it galloped or what the body did *exactly* when jumping over a chair.  When you couple this with fourth-dimension material one wonders why it took several more decades to bump into these images in the art world of the earliest part of the twentieth century.

In 1895 50-year-old Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s ephochal discovery was announced (“Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen". "On a New Type of Ray"), built upon the work of J. Plucker (1801-1868), J. W. Hittorf (1824-1914), C. F. Varley (1828-1883), E. Goldstein (1850-1931), Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), H. Hertz (1857-1894) and the horribly odious Phil Lenard (1862-1947 and who didn’t die soon enough). The experiment revealed as much to humans as did the experiments and inventions of Hooke and Leeuwenhoek on the invisible worlds revealed by their microscopes. Bertha, Roentgen’s wife, sat for 15 minutes while her husband passed his rays through her hand; she ran from the room once she saw the results, revealing her very bones and no doubt a strong sense of the fragility of life, and the strong presence of death.  Many had the a similar reaction to the Kandinsky's shapes and Malevich’s white circles and red rectangles and Ibsen’s drama and Einstein’s dancing dust and the rogue syncopation of jazz—these newnesses were threatening to all of the established ways of looking at physics, and art, and theatre, and listening to jazz.  It was a new perspective which challenged the firmly established vision of these things, upsetting the nature of comfort and acceptance.    It is probably a very natural reaction to try and protect established memory—but memory is made all of the time, and so should be relatively flexible…at least it is mechanically healthier to allow a little bending than to be rigid and brittle. 

A Long, Low, Massive Circle: Circular Building, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 639  Blog Bookstore

This re-surfaced idea for a mega-spa was very wide, very long and very low.  Karl Stoldeck and J. Goldmerstein—architects and planners in Berlin—published a broad idea in 1928 called Thermenpalast (Thermal Palace, Spa Space, something like that), and although it seemed to satisfy almost everyone, the idea was consumed in the general economic malaise of the depression of 1929.  It looks as though the idea had a little life again in 1934, but there was a problem with fund raising.  The idea came back again, broader, bigger, and more defined, finding some idea-space in the Popular Science Monthly for March, 1938.

The structure for health and exercise was massive—as a matter of fact, it would’ve been the most massive circular project in history.  The building had 6.5 acres under glass, which makes it 280k or so feet, giving the building a diameter of 1,800 feet and a circumference of something just over a mile.  IT looks as though the ceiling reached a maximum of 250’ or so; seeing that the dome would also be about 1200, that presents a little engineering problem.  But no matter:  it would never be built, anyway, even with Nazi dollars from home.

The building was quite a feast of the body—there was a mountainside panorama around the exterior wall, illuminated from a  series of light sources from the ceiling.  In diminishing concentric circles: there was a mile-long running track, a promenade just inside that, followed by a spectacular pool which looks to be 4000’ long and 100’ wide!  Interior to the pool was a wide “beach”, a restaurant, park and lounging area.

This was also a multi-floor building, with gyms and restaurants and a long series of health baths.  The entire spectacle would offer many different climates depending on the needs of the clientele. 

The cost:  6 million, U.S. A few years earlier the Empire State  building was built for $24,718,000. The architectural firm Foster + Partners released designs for a the largest building (“Crystal Island”)  ever built:  2.5 million square meters (8.2 million feet, or 35 times bigger than this 1938 idea), with a tower 1476 feet tall, all sort of circular, and to be built in Moscow.

Had the thing been built in Berlin and started in 1938, it would’ve been about ready to bombed on the day of its completion. 

Here's an interesting read on water parks:  Water, leisure and culture: European historical perspectives, Susan C. Anderson, Bruce H. Tabb, 2002.

Ships in the Skyline, Part V: Cities INSIDE of Ships

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 308       

In trailing some loose associative memories of ships being compared to skylines, and seeing he ships placed in the skylines, I was able to find four good samples.  This one is, in a way, the negative version of that, showing cities placed inside of the ships, the ship in this case being the White Star triple-screw Olympic--which at the time was the largest ship ever launched at 882'--and the image found in The Illustrated London News for 22 October 1910.  It was done in celebration of the launch of the ship from Belfast, which was also the heaviest transference of weight (27,000 tons) from land to water in history.   To illustrate the ship's massiveness the picture editor placed a row of hotels and buildings bounded by the eastern end of Burlington House to the very edge of Piccadilly Circus, with the Piccadilly Hotel (height 77' 6") right there in the middle under the first three smoke stacks. 

The second image relates the passenger capacity of the Olympic to the Savoy Hotel, showing a floating platform with four of these massive hotels.  The Illustrated London News was making a real point about the Olympic and the Savoy, because at around this time smaller ships were referred to as "floating hotels"; the Olympic, on the other hand, was much more than that--it was four floating hotels, and big ones, at that, and the image captures that perfectly. 

Truth be told, I really like the image of the floating hotels out of context and without a caption--it really makes the case for the idea of a Floating City in a Floating World. 

[CLick for a larger, clearer image]