JF Ptak Science Books

Daily Dose from Dr. Odd: What is It? (1887)

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What is it? You'll be surprised at what this device does, given the gear, and the weight, and the utter simple beauty of the thing. 

Answer below! 

Smell-orama without the Rama (1895)

 

 

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"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses." Jean Cocteau

Maybe so and maybe no, and if not, maybe they should...especially for the poets.  But this come from the writer with only the memory of smell for an olfactory sense.  

I looked around without success in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project to find something relating to this image, which turns out to be a scent dispenser. These buggers were quite popular (at least in France) and used to be hung at entrances to popular venues where patrons could scent themselves with this-and-that for a few pennies. It seems positively Terry Gilliam-ish to me, but that's what it was.  

Source: Scientific American, 1895 (apologies for the skimpy date)

 

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses." Jean Cocteau

Maybe so and maybe no, and if not, maybe they should...especially for the poets.  But this come from the writer with only the memory of smell for an olfactory sense.  

I looked around without success in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project to find something relating to this image, which turns out to be a scent dispenser. These buggers were quite popular (at least in France) and used to be hung at entrances to popular venues where patrons could scent themselves with this-and-that for a few pennies. It seems positively Terry Gilliam-ish to me, but that's what it was.  

Source: Scientific American, 1895 (apologies for the skimpy date)

Clouds, Paddle W-Patterns, Hot Ice, and other Attractions: "Nature" magazine, 1881

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I just finished a short post about the wide-ranging W. Stanley Jevons  review of John Venn's classic book, Symbolic Logic, when I had another look at the contents of the slim issue of Nature in which the article appeared. This Nature is our present-day mega-Nature, but here in 1871 it was only in its 12^th year. And even though the issue was only 17 pages long, it was filled with an astonishing range of succinct papers, and heavily seasoned with bits for the generally curious of the high Victorian era. After you read the gentleman's gentleman high-end astronomer Henry Draper's paper, you could read "the Physiology of Mind reading" and follow that up with "Mind and Muscle-Reading". Piazzi Smith followed that with "Special Solar Heat-Radiations and their Earth-felt effects", with "Phenomena of Clouds", "early English Pendulum Measures", and J.A. Fleming's "Faure's Secondary Battery". Papers on earthquakes and meteors, and then the wonderfully enticing "The W-Pattern in Paddles" and of course "Hot Ice". It all ends up with an extended article by G.G. Stokes'  (a remarkable physicist and mathematician who spent his entire career at Cambridge, the vast majority of that as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1849 until he died in 1903) "Whirled Anemometers", which occupies about a third of the issue. 

The Department of "What is It?" (#1)

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On a recent reading graze I found this most interesting image and thought that it could be a number of things besides the thing that it really was:

So, what is it?

A) An attempt at a Time Machine.  (Stephen Hawking said  “[i]t seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians”.  Feh for our story line and image! We'll let this stand and say that this would be a Wellsian vs. Thornian time machine.)

B)  A Victorian listening device for extreme and well-to-do introverts that allows for the home dweller to stay inside and listen to everything that is going on in the immediate vicinity of their house.  The remarkable bit here is that it was discussed that a retired physician, Manbot Fettle Dolp had one of these devices installed at his house in Kensington and actually recorded some 100 Edison cylinders worth of found sounds, an acoustical portrait of high Victorian London that without his effort would have been completely lost.

C) A tailoring device that would automatically record all physical attributes of a customer when they passed through the thing--it turns out that physical anthropologists used the device first to record all body aspect of criminals for a database of "what criminality looks like", but the results and tests were abandoned after it was determined that the author of the study, Rev. Fitzwilliam Fitz William, was the perfect average of the criminals he measured. Rev. Fitz William said the results were obviously "deeply and irretrievably wrong", though he did have some thoughts on the redemption of the project when writing from his prison cell twenty years later in Reading Goal. 

D)  The terminal of a central telegraphic station. ("The requirements of telegraphic communication on a large scale created widespread telegraphic networks. The "nodes" of a network, shown here, involved a respectably large number of circuits.")

Answer below the "Note":

Note:

A Miniature, Individualized Velodrome (1903)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post      Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

I couldn't resist a simple post of this image of solo-velodrome--a curious bit for one rider held by one person.  The "held" part is certainly unusual and very ambitious, the thing being designed for high amusement--it appeared as part of a show at the Dresden Victoria Salon,  and was published in the August 8, 1903 issue of Scientific American.  

Holes for the Living and the Dead: Prisoners & Roman Columbaria

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Part of the History of Holes series

While browsing a volume of the Scientific American  (Scientific American Supplement #1453, November 7, 1903) I came across a picture of the Columbarium of the Villa Codini, Licinian Gardens, Rome, and then within a minute I came upon a similar scene just dozens of pages away--a striking likeness, though this time the sculpted openings were for the living.  It showed a lecture being delivered to inmates of a criminal sanatorium, hearing about the evils of alcohol, each prisoner stored away in his own little box. "Columbarium" comes from the Latin word ("columba") for "dove-cote", and it is easy to see the similarity between the sepulchral images. 

 

There is another image that I've saved but which has no reference for origin. It depicts prisoners in a European institution attending a Sunday service:

An Eight-Person Crew Tricycle, 1896

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SO--this is either a very large tricycle with average-sized crew, or an average-sized trike operated by tiny people.  Since it appeared in the November 11, 1896 issue of Scientific American--which had a very very slight leverage on humor--I report here that this was indeed a very large tricycle. As a matter of fact it required a crew of eight to operate, and weighed in at about 1500 pounds.  It was actually constructed, as this crew peddled it around the Boston area for a 125-mile jaunt.  Why this was done--other for the sake of doing it--I do not know.  It seems someone just made a Big Thing, coming (as the short description in the issue says) "in this age of 'big things' ".

In the Golden Age of Bicycles--a 25-cent Bike

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Today I joked with a neighbor that my car was so old that it has wooden seat belts.  At least it has seat belts, no thanks to the early (pre-1989) efforts of people like Lee Ioccoca to prevent having them automatically installed, and unlike the Flintstones and Jimmy Rockford and others who had no seat belts at all--it is more like Granny's rope-belt in the Beverly Hillbillies. Be that as it may, this bicycle is a much better creation than my seat belts.  The image appeared in the Scientific American for February 1, 1896, a half tongue-in-check proposal at a time of a great bicycle craze. Even though millions of bicycles were being made, a decent one could cost you $25, which would (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator) would be about $750-$1000 today--not nothing.  So this Modest Proposal on making a bike from bits, found wood, and a quarter.  

Earth Squared and Halved and Shrunken and Invisible and Doubled and Miniaturized

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1936 (expanded)

This post is a part of overlapping categories, including:

• Duplicate Earths (including Mondo Bizarro, Science Afflictions and the Dubious Mind—Bad Science, Part 1. NYC in Space (?!) here and Extra-Earth Humano-Alien Souls From Outer Space Repopulate Earth-Hell!!(??) here)
• Strange Things in the Sky, and New York City Attacked (including such posts as New York City: Attacked by Tentacled Flying Saucers, Giant Flying Snakes, Glaciers, and Mining Missile Space Aliens, 1929-1941)
• And before we get to Mystery in Space I wanted to make an uncommon addition to the "Duplicate Earth" category--I really  don't find "Extra Earths" too often and so I feel a certain obligation in reporting them.  And so, the Extra Earth of Fletcher Hanks' cover for his very uncommon superhero creation, Stardust:

I don't know if this is an actual Extra Earth that makes an appearance in a Stardust episode, or if it is just a repeated element of design--from what I have seen from Hanks, it could easily be either. 

And now on the the rest:

 

In the eight years or so of collecting information and stories for the odd-bits section of this blog  I have never encountered so many choice visual examples in one place for strange/weirdly-imagined/impossible/high-SciFi of the Earth than with the comic book, Mystery in Space. The very dedicated keepers of Coverbrowse.com website have reproduced thousands (?) of covers of pulpily-published science fiction and exotic-thinking comics books, including the home base in which all sixteen-plus years of Mystery in Space live.

Imagining Antiquarian Additive Urgency

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   Daily Dose from Dr. Odd series

Such is the nature of the small but desperate urgencies that they come at large and ultra-desperate times, actions required of impossible and uneven urgence, responses vaulted into the black hole of needless authority.  Or some such.  That is the way some of these images looked to me, removed from their context, taking away their stories and supplying one's own. Urgently.

This post is related in a way to this blog's series on using a "paper microscope" to find semi-hidden human geographies in old prints--where there are scenes of low drama taking place in the tiny incidental detail of some architectural rendering of some sort.  In this case, though, the story is the main image, though the original story has simply been removed.  So, our urgencies (top to bottom): the expression of urgent staying-in-bed, despite entreaties and an advancing army; urgent sleeping to ward off an advancing lion, horse, and highwaymen; terrifically urgent sitting, even when being upended and beaten with sticks to make the sitting stop; and, finally, urgent suicide (with backup sword at the ready) to evade capture of an advancing army.  The end.

• Image source: Theatre Historique (I believe), Amsterdam, ca. 1700-1710, published by Pieter van der Aa. 

 

When the Catcher's Mitt Was a Cage (1904)

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In the history of baseball gloves--better still, in the history of the catcher's mitt--there are few ideas that are as singular as the glove/mitt that isn't a glove, or a mitt.  This was the patent report of the invention of J.E. Bennett in 1904, which proposed to replace the mitt with a cage.  The cage offered a receiving area easily double the size of a catcher's mitt, with padding at the back of the cage to cushion the capture of the pitched ball, after which the ball would somehow be collected and deposited via that pipe.  I'm not sure what the catcher would do with pitched balls that were low, or high, but the cage certainly did not have any real versatility, particularly when comparing it to a real glove. It seems as though this idea didn't go far, and that was a good thing. 

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2015/may/14/imagining-the-future-turn-of-the-century-us-patents-in-pictures

 

 

 

The .50-Caliber Better Mousetrap

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post    Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

  [Source:  Google Patents, https://www.google.com/patents/US269766?dq=patent:269766&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiyw_r6277JAhUGSiYKHV_eCdkQ6wEILDAC]

Well, there's not much that one can say about this that the reader is not already thinking.  

The idea was that of J.E. Bennett of Fredonia, Texas, who patented the "trap" in 1882.  He reports that this apparatus has been used before, as a house "alarm". He states in the patent that  "I am aware that burglar-alarms of various kinds have been used, and which have been connected to windows and doors in such a manner that the opening of the window or door causes a pressure upon a lever which discharges a tire-arm; but in no case have the parts been arranged and combined as here shown and described."  Indeed.  I think that this sort of "alarm" was declared illegal decades ago because its use employed depraved indifference.  Poor little critter.  

Book Fists

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post      Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

Just a collection of hands on the covers of books and pamphlets. I guess it is sort of interesting that the hands that started this small collection in the first three examples are two fists and a gloved half-fist snuffing out a lamp; the fourth example is a power thumb, and the the rest of the examples I came up with were almost entirely open-handed. I'm sure that there must be plenty of fist images on book covers out there, but in my brief soiree I only found a few.  

 

History of Lines: Circles, Cartesian Vortices, Tree Rings, or ?

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• The return of the Daily Dose of Dr. Odd (!) and also a contribution to the
• History of Lines series.  

At first (and second) glance this image comes very close to looking like a display of Rene Descartes' illustrated cosmology (featuring his vortices ("tourbillons")).  The images are indeed similar--first, the mystery image, followed by one of the Cartesian tourbillons (from Principes de la Philosophie from 1644):

[Primary image, detail.]

And the image from Descartes:

 [Primary image, receding.]

Is the primary image another incidence of the Cartesian cosmology as we see in the original and in other places, like in Nicholas Bion (in 1710)?

Surprise!

The primary image in question is actually a plowed-over landing strip, the place done in by German sappers sometime in 1944, to render the airfield useless once the Germans pulled back.  In any event the image struck me as being similar in design to Descartes, though for the Germans it represented more a catastrophic collapse more than anything else.  

Judging Two Books by their Ten-Cent Covers

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These are two full-cover pamphlets that promise a compelling amount for the ten-cent admission fee.  The first is newer, published for ten cents in 1932; the second was printed in 1908, and for the same amount (and worth about 14 cents in 1908 monies, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator).  They are each Outsidery-flavored efforts in their fields, so far as I can tell--they are also not quite interesting enough to spend any time with outside of remarking on their remark-able covers, which is sometimes that is all you need.  (The second pamphlet is actually by a very well known and influential theological person, Edward Hine, who may have achieved his greatest fame I try to establish that England is Israel, among other things, and developed a considerable following.)

I have other remarkable books with title similar to these in length, and composition--I'll need to pull them all together, someday. I think that the most glorious days of enormous titles are hundreds of years in the past, and mostly 17th century from my perspective; these more-modern examples are not only long, but they are challenging and promising, all at the same time.