JF Ptak Science Books

Fantasia of the Air--Cops, Booze, Marriage, and a Monkey. (1890)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2776

Well, not quite a fantasia, but more like a "fanciful/fantastical/imaginary" collection of  "flying objects" ("objets volants de fantaisie"), a whimsical look at the very near future (or so) of airship flight in 1890. This future seems to make room for everyone in the air, and celebrated by a collection of worldwide nationalities on the ground. There really isn't a title for it,  and the print is indexed according to the posters/signs adorning the floating businesses and municipal pleasantries.  According to the excellent French library  site "Galica" the print is catalogued as "Sanatoir aérien du docteur Farceur, bureau volant de mariage, police aérienne [objets volants de fantaisie]", which is entirely unpoetic and slightly galling given the subject matter, and merely describes some of the objects in the print. The only part of the title that hints at the delightful subject matter is the "police aerienne", which would in spite of its clumsiness at least raise an eyebrow of just about any overworked research mole:

[Image source: Galica https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53024091c/f1.item]

What vision of the future of aviation doesn't include two flying doggies and a monkey? This one does. At top right we have part of the title, a marquee for a floating sanitarium run by "Dr. Farceur", which is probably some very light wordplay implicating a medical jester. There's the police station, marriage chapel, a hook-up joint (sounding better as a "ballon de rendez-vous"), and a bar/cafe/restaurant. The law is there directing traffic and making an arrest; there are two ships, one a warship with a skull-and-bones and the other probably not; there's a pamphleteer literally dropping his suggestions, some ladies with attaches, and a long-shoe Flaneur. Belting it all together is some sort of chorus line, though these ladies aren't attached to any flying thing save for the wings on their backs. All in all, this is a fine and pleasing work, full of action, and probably not so impressed with the actual future of human flight.  

Martians on Venus, Unknown-but-Known Math, and Other Blow-Uppy Things (1930)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2773

Here's a story¹ from 1930 that seems to have it all in a series of interesting and reaching ideas: the destruction of all matter, an all-powerful equation on atomic energy, a mention of Einstein, the integraph, an invasion of Martians, disintegrating rays, and some other stuff, not the least of which was a newly-created computer's identification of unknown fields of mathematics. Too bad the article is so badly written.

Oh yes: there's a nice, adroit twist here, right at the beginning—the story is written in the future of 1957 relating the story from a decade earlier, so its an historical piece from the future.

The story goes like this: humanoid-ish Martians (from a green Mars) arrive on Earth in a threatening convoy of unknowingly-sophisticated spacecraft, who may or may not be up to no good. The protagonist/narrator is ready for an invasion if there was one, even though the visitors possess weapons of enormous power; he assumes an assertive, offensive position, and seemingly with the question in the wind of what in the world these Martians were doing here, engages them. He had the tools for the fight, having invented a supercomputing super-intelligent computer that had unearthed (so to speak) unknown fields of mathematics which led to the creation of “the ultimate, definitive equation of all matter” that told us how to completely destroy matter by “releasing energy from atoms”. It also led to the creation of anti-gravity, “total-matter” energy, distintegrating rays, and of course atomic power, among other punchy sci-fi things.

There's also a short mention of Einstein² thrown in, as well as a tip of the hat to the Vannevar Bush's great integraph (as the author of the piece was a 20-year-old sophomore at MIT when the machine was still pretty new).

The defense of the Earth was complete, the future was maintained for at least another 27 years, and the Martians were carted off and dropped onto Venus.

[Image Source: Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/amazingstoriesmagazine?&sort=-downloads&page=2]

Notes:

1.   John W. Campbell, "When the Atoms Failed", in Amazing Stories, vol 4 #10, 1930. Published by Hugo Gernsback.     
2. According to what seems to be an excellent work on the sci fi genre, Everett Franklin Bleiler and Richard Bleiler's Science-fiction: The Gernsback Years : a Complete Coverage of the Genre ...there are only two mentions of Einstein in relation to “atom Smashing” in their 1840+ article reviews.

Big, Big Guns (Real and Imagined)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2763

While looking for an article on the imaginary gatekeepers of Martian canals in The Electrical Experimenter (1915) I found this illustration for a piece of speculative military tech (first image, below). The annoyingly-capitalized caption states this to be an "Electro Magnetc" gun 90' long and rapid-firing 19-inch (480mm) HE. I guess they were somewhere along the very early reaches for the idea of what would become the contemporary EM rail gun being developed by the U.S. Navy. The power source for the gun shown above is not quite what the Navy has developed, as they employ something along the lines of a multi-million ampere pulsed DC power supply that creates the conductance to launch a shell with a muzzle velocity of 3500 m/s. At this point you don't need explosives to cause damage at the other end--you just need a projectile. The 1915 version is far offline, except for the initial idea, which is a good one. Besides the shortcomings in the implementation realm of this weapon the writer here doesn't have a very long vision for the future of warfare, saying that his cannon would be devastating to "forts". This idea I thought was certainly quaint when written given that WWI was already into its second year, and unless by "forts" the writer meant "trenches", this visioneer was very visioneering.  

[Image source: https://archive.org/details/electricalexperi03gern/page/350  Click to expand for a clearer image.]

Massive, monster cannons have existed for many years in idealized and theoretical, speculative worlds, like Tom Swift and his Monster Cannon.  In the history of early imaginary big guns H.G. Wells’ Babel-like cannon (pictured below in a still from the movie Things to Come (1936), an adaptation his The Shape of Tings to Come from 1931) is monumentally fabulous --1500 feet tall, with what looks like a  750' base, all of which launched a 75' tall capsule beyond the Earth’s

gravitational pull with a spectacular explosiveness that would’ve made its occupants into instant jelly.  Tangentally-speaking here the launching of an object to escape the Earth's gravity didn't occur until 1946 when the highly-problematic but nevertheless-genius Fritz Zwicky fashioned a device to an experimental V-2 and via an electric explosive charge punched some object into space.

Dueling Intergalactic Rocket Ports, in Glorious BIG Color! (1938+1939)

 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This was a big gulp of a very colorful possible futureworld in which intergalactic travel has become possible, this image of this model being given an advanced peek prior to the New York World's Fair of 1939.  "Intergalactic" is a big deal, because, well, there are galaxy-sized distances involved--even in Star Trek the Next Generation, the Enterprise never in the run of that series leaves the galaxy under its own power, and so the possibility of travel between the galaxies such that there could be a "rocketport" for it would be a very big deal, indeed.

[Source 1: Popular Mechanics, volume 70, August, 1938]

Perhaps that is what was needed at the New York World's Fair of 1939, given the state of things--the Great Depression, the Munich Appeasement and the hollow "peace in our time", the Austrian Anschluss, the seizure of the Sudetenland, Kristallnacht, the Spanish Civil War, and the continuation of the Japanese assault on China, all could have spelled out the need for some sort of relief even if that was fictional and in the future. Certainly intergalactic travel would qualify for that, as did a number of other pieces of speculative/scifi entertainment that year: Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were alive and well, Superman appears for the first time, and Orson Welles scares the wits out of a certain segment of the population  with the Halloween-night performance of "The War of the Worlds". Perhaps the time was ripe for the rocket port--especially in such vivid color. 

The reason for the "dueling" int he title of this post is the following image that appeared in Views of the New York World's Fair, 1939, published about a year later:

The images are very similar, though the 1939 image is much fuller and a bit more contrasty, with heavier blues and more details in the "spotlight" or whatever that light source was in the center of the image. Also, there are no crowds to speak of in the 1939 image, jsut a few people scattered here and there, and there are also no futurismo boat or train.  I think I like the second one better....

 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This was a big gulp of a very colorful possible futureworld in which intergalactic travel has become possible, this image of this model being given an advanced peek prior to the New York World's Fair of 1939.  "Intergalactic" is a big deal, because, well, there are galaxy-sized distances involved--even in Star Trek the Next Generation, the Enterprise never in the run of that series leaves the galaxy under its own power, and so the possibility of travel between the galaxies such that there could be a "rocketport" for it would be a very big deal, indeed.

[Source 1: Popular Mechanics, volume 70, August, 1938]

Perhaps that is what was needed at the New York World's Fair of 1939, given the state of things--the Great Depression, the Munich Appeasement and the hollow "peace in our time", the Austrian Anschluss, the seizure of the Sudetenland, Kristallnacht, the Spanish Civil War, and the continuation of the Japanese assault on China, all could have spelled out the need for some sort of relief even if that was fictional and in the future. Certainly intergalactic travel would qualify for that, as did a number of other pieces of speculative/scifi entertainment that year: Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were alive and well, Superman appears for the first time, and Orson Welles scares the wits out of a certain segment of the population  with the Halloween-night performance of "The War of the Worlds". Perhaps the time was ripe for the rocket port--especially in such vivid color. 

The reason for the "dueling" int he title of this post is the following image that appeared in Views of the New York World's Fair, 1939, published about a year later:

The images are very similar, though the 1939 image is much fuller and a bit more contrasty, with heavier blues and more details in the "spotlight" or whatever that light source was in the center of the image. Also, there are no crowds to speak of in the 1939 image, jsut a few people scattered here and there, and there are also no futurismo boat or train.  I think I like the second one better....

 

Pre-History of the A-Bomb: Arming Nukes with Your Teeth, 1914.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2741

“Atomic Bomb” appeared in print for the first time thirty years before there was one. It appeared in H.G. Wells' The World Set Free, written in 1913 and published in 1914, evidently before the appearance of the guns of August later in that year. The “set free” part of the world in Wells' hands doesn't come without an atomic struggle, though, much of the novel being a stage-up for the last bit in which people realize that atomic-bombing everything everywhere is not the way to go.

There are other atomic-conjoined terms in this book besides “bomb”, and they are somewhat telling of the period. Wells does make a good strike with “atomic bomb”, “atomic ammunition”, and “atomic power”, and then goes on to describe the other bits that could benefit from this atomicity, including “atomic aeroplanes”, “atomic hay lorries”, “atomic traction engines”, “atomic riveters” (riveting at twice the pace of a human), and “atomic smelters”. So there are some weak spots here and there in his 57 mentions of “atomic-something”, and that's okay—he did some pretty good sightseeing into the future with the bomb.

And he was definitely the first to use “atomic bomb”, according to many sources and not the least of which is the OED (which also provides another interesting example of the word in use, quoting the Yale Review in 1917 “When you can drop just one atomic bomb and wipe out Paris or Berlin, war will have become monstrous and impossible”.) “Atomic-bombed”, “atomic bombing”, and “Atomic bomber” do not make their appearance in the English language until after August 6 in 1945.

The first view of the atomic bomb in Wells finds that there not one but three of them, all contained in a "coffin-shaped box", and even with a 2' diameter were small enough to be stored under a person's legs. The “essential element” in its construction was a substance named “Carolinum¹”, which thus far had been “tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel chambers embedded in lead”.

The 50 Million Volt Dust Curtain of Nikola Tesla (1934)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2709

The “dust” in question here is not intended to be weaponized versions of those famous dancing bits of Brown and Einstein, but a very very high voltage-invisible-something that would obliterate any attacking air force or army. The idea is one in a long history of “death rays”, though this one belonged to Nikola Tesla (who had a much earlier outline for an idea on militarizing wireless telegraphy technology) and as such was received with considerable respect in the public and scientific spheres—or, at least in scientific areas, the low/no detail plan was given inspection and testing before it was dismissed.

The popular press (Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Newsweek) reported that Tesla had plans for a country-wide defensive network that would basically make the U.S. Impregnable and put an end to war. One problem was that there were nearly no details offered for the plan—at least until this article (“Invisible Dust Curtain to Halt War Planes”) appeared in Popular Mechanics in November 1934. Even though this as an extended version of the idea, there's scant detail in this article as well. But, Tesla being Tesla, the idea was given wide circulation.

Simply put, the article reports that Tesla “discovered force rays which can be projected like long curtains and through which planes cannot penetrate” which was composed of “microscopically-fine” “possibly dust of some sort”bits “driven electrically” at “velocities” of 50,000,000 volts and which would form invisible walls that were miles high and surrounded the country. And so thus powered the weapon could destroy an army of one million and an attacking air force of 10,000. Somehow all of this would permanently disable aircraft engines as well as destroy soldiers.

Evidently the plan for this invention was based upon four other inventions which hadn't yet been invented, which would explain the lack of details. Nevertheless, the National Bureau of Standards did investigate and attempt to reproduce something resembling the results that Tesla was trying to bring about, but obviously failed, even though Popular Mechanics had reported some successes in experimentation.

It seems to me that Tesla's technology was far more powerful and advanced than many of its fictional rivals like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and maybe even so of the Martian weapons from Wells' The War of the Worlds.

Notes:

For an interesting read in this area I was surprised to what looks like a thorough and engaging work by William J. Fanning, Jr.: Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876–1939: A Study of Directed Energy Weapons in Fact, Fiction, and Film (McFarland, 2015) page 95

Also, it is a curious thing that when I googled "tesla" the first reference to Nikolai was at the bottom of the 9th page, nearly 100th in line after the car/company--and that is just all sorts of wrong.

The Invasion of Musical Robots, 1929

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

There is little doubt that scribes and woodblock cutters and such absorbed the stab of the movable type printing press, and that stationers felt the stab of modernity when the telegraph came into play threatening sales of paper generally used for letter-writing, an art form that they felt would be diminished by the new technology. At about the same time though came the second revolution in mail delivery, which made it cheaper and more regulated in using a more-competent mailing system, which meant an increase in letter writing. Ditto that for the telephone, which again would threaten written communication. Movies too threatened the theater, and on and on.  

And so too for music, the musician, and recorded music. I suspect that in the 53 years since Mr. Edison's invention of the phonograph that not many musicians made very much in the way of royalties for their recorded music, at least not at this early date. (On the other hand my guess is that there was a different economic experience in the sheet music department.)  On the other hand, there was a popularization of music far beyond what had been possible in the period before recorded music, so there was at least that direct and enormous benefit.

Then came recorded music in theaters, which was a different thing entirely, as there was no real direct benefit to musicians--in this instance, live accompaniment would disappear in favor of recorded music, and so to the jobs of thousands of players.  

And so the reason for this advertisement in The Nation, placed by the American Federation of Musicians, which found the idea of "canned music" to have nothing to do with "the Art of Music", and representing it as a robot, "a pale shadow of real Music". "Machinery can do many things well, from a  utilitarian viewpoint, but music lovers deplore its attempted invasion of music, where only the hands and hearts of gifted humans can give true aesthetic pleasure."

"Surely, America is too intelligent to tolerate--and pay for--a Titmouse conception of the art of music."

 

 

A Peek at the Future in Which Jobs Are Not Threatened by Machines (1940)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is the front and back cover of a little work directed at upper-aged kids in 1940 about how they might be employed and what life might be like in the future.  The Opportunity for Youth in Building the World of Tomorrow, published by General Motors in 1940, is a lot more sanguine and less interesting than its cover, sorry to say--but the cover is enough to reprint here, all on its own.  

There is one odd thing, one missed peep into the future, and it is made by a great figure in the history of 20th century science, Karl T. Compton, who at the time was president of MIT. He responded to a question about the impact of mechanization in a short section labeled "Man vs. Machine". Dr. Compton got a lot right in his life and saw a lot of things that other people didn't or couldn't, but in 1940, he couldn't see very far into the future of the machine.  Of course there's a particular irony with this vision and what would happen with humans v. robots at GM.  So it goes. 

 

The Highways of Tomorrow 1937 (and 1938)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2701

The future--as presented in the following two pamphlets--was coming, and it was guided on a 100'-wide flat ribbon of cement, with a life-blood moving along it at 45 mph.  It is presented by Frank Sheets (president of the American Association of State Highway Officials), and the world looked like the cement that would be produced and purchased from the publisher of this pamphlet, the Portland Cement Company. And they'd be right, there would need to be something for the exploding auto market to get to and fro on the expanding horizon of city- and suburb-spread. To that end there exists in this work a proposal for 3 million miles of highways at a cost of $57,000,000,000, which was equal to about 75% of the entire budget of the U.S. government. It was a big plan--the proposal itself can't be found in the pamphlet.

[Source: Frank T. Sheets, The Highway of Tomorrow, Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Greater New York Safety Council at Hotel Astor in New York City, April 14, 1937.] 

Another vision of the future A Dream, a Reality" and/or "Coast to Coast Transcontinental Super Highway isn't actually the title of this work even though they are on the cover; it is mostly a caption for an interior image though it somehow percolated topside.  The real title is The Highway of Tomorrow made Possible by the Ideal of Today, which gets to the subject of the work even though it is slightly unwieldy. It is difficult to say who wrote this though Mr. T.E. Steiner ("Sponsor", of Wooster, Ohio) and which somehow found its way to a fourth edition in its two years of existence, published and promoted in undoubtedly small numbers by the "Transcontinental Stream-Lined Super Highway of the United States of America" in 1938.

This is all about super-highways, and mainly replacing the old roads with four new roads that are as straight as straight could be. A map of the proposals features one line of the highway is straight from San Francisco to Boston; another from Laredo, Texas (!) direct to International Falls, Minnesota (!);  a third not-straight shot from Boston-Allentown-near-Valdosta Ga-Miami; and another from near-Valdosta to Cleveland. A schematic of this map though drops near-Valdosta for Jacksonville, and has the Boston-Miami route further east to include NYC and D.C., which are omitted from the map.  Ah, well.

I think that the author--an accomplished "business man" was was the head of a "manufacturing company" in Ohio and a coal company in West Virginia (and "employer of labor") --was not much of an engineer, because the plan ignores topography and the highway design itself is pretty bad, especially the parts on exit/entrance (which the author takes particular care to note are separately copyrighted (?)) bits, which are killers. 

In any event, the super highway extending into the clouds on the cover is all I'm here for.  Mr. Steiner no doubt attracted some attention for the project because of the enormous pork and public works potential, what with the building of 6,000 miles or whatever of an 8-lane highway, which is billions of square feet of paving times some multiplier.  So a lot of money would be spent, which means, well, a lot of possible interest--after all, it did get so far as a hearing before the Committee on Roads, U.S. House of Representatives, on May 18, 1937.

This no doubt was a "visionary"proposal of some sort, though the engineering aspects of it were more imaginary than anything else. 

 

 

Propaganda Maps--a Play for Greater Germany, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

[Image: The Illustrated London News, p 575, April 2, 1938.]

The title and the date of this map pretty much tells at least the partial story of the beginning of WWII. The "Aryanized" Vienna (Wien) shows up with the rest of Austria as German-speaking but also outside the boundaries of Germany, even though the Anschluss Österreichs occurred about three weeks earlier. "Pan Germany" was still figuratively so, in spite of the absorption of Austria.  Prague sits nearly surrounded by Germania irredentia, and of course Czechoslovakia was next, with Germany beginning the theft of the country that October, and then only about a year after the appearance of this article, Hitler was giving a speech at Prague Castle, also declaring Bohemia and Moravia to be the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This linguistic map certainly portrayed the gaping maw of the Nazi Kraken, Germany declaring that these actions was a natural right in the protection of Germans-outside-Germany. 

 

Dumping Garbage in the Sky and Other Visions of the Future, (1906)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2685

Gov. Jerry Brown (D, CA) once had a vision of getting rid of nuclear waste--load it into rockets and shoot it into space. Dumping radioactive materials in the sky was at least a novel idea though not a very good one, what with the possibility of imperfection built into sending the highly dangerous material from the ground and out of orbit. He was not the first to suggest getting rid of unwantables (excluding burning things) in the sky.

An earlier and perhaps weirder (though I doubt it) idea came in a section of this image of the future, found in the pages of Puck magazine in 1910.  The illustrator, J.S. Pughe¹, had a pretty high time picturing the future, and was probably half-right, in a way. The cartoon came out at the time that the Panama Canal was under constructed (it was completed in 1914), and Pughe thought that--given the new advances in flight in the few years following the Wright's first heavier than air flight--the canal would be made obsolete in short order. To that end he depicted what might be a common use of the airship, the most prominent being the touring vessel, offering its passengers a true "bird's-eye" view of whatever there was to see.  There's also the Cong Air Line just below it, dinghy in tow, and an conventioneer airship for "Hughie Ginty" whatever that might be.  There's also a floating battleship, and up in the left-top corner there is a way off course Staten Island Ferry, thousands of miles from home, having missed its visual clues in navigating the Narrows. Oddly there are no depictions of freight aircraft, which is probably themost essential aspect of the canal (after military purposes). 

Overall, it is a pretty light-hearted view of the future. we even seen a "water-wagon" floating on by, filled to capacity with people with generally non-committal expressions. I do believe that this is the famous "wagon" onto which people with a drinking problem would ride on the road to sobriety.  One version of the "on the wagon" expression dates back to the late 19th c and the Salvation Army, the members of which would drive a wagon looking for folks in need of cleaner leaving and a perhaps-salvation, offering them a ride back to headquarter/church/whatever and the promise of drinking water and not booze.  It is I think that this interpretation of this particular water wagon being a sobriety ride is hammered down when you look closely at the face of the guy falling off the wagon, because he looks to be happy and a little on the drunky side of things.

 There's some dark bits to this haphazard scene as well. There seem to be a lot of falling people. At least six people are headed down, including a couple at top-right in a rowboat under a failed balloon (with a sky-cop in pursuit), and another person falling with his failed bird wings. For a whimsical peep into a contentious future, the artist may have decided to add an aerial version of the commonplace tragedy of being run over by a streetcar. 

The oddest thing, though (and this gets us back to Jerry Brown) is the much-magnified "N.Y. Street Cleaning Department" dumping refuse over the side of an airship (of unknown propulsion and engineering). Perhaps the artist decided that In The Future the use of the sky will be so commonplace that people will use it as they had streams and harbors and other bodies of water--as a dumping ground. On the other hand maybe it is just showing that this is exactly what is happening, again, only from a height, and into the Panama Canal.  

[Image source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.26030/   My details are taken from the 132 meg download available on their site.]

Notes:

1. John Samuel Pughe, Welsh-born U.S. artist, 1870-1909.  He joined Puck in 1894 and worked there until his early death in 1909. Puck, v. 59, no. 1509 (1906 January 31), centerfold.

Before writing this post script this blog entry ended at 713 words--that's the final tally of Babe Ruth's home runs, which is a good place to end. 

Moving Stationary People on a Moving Sidewalk and Not Moving People on a Stationary Sidewalk (1903)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2684

I came upon this interesting pamphlet and thought to share it: Transportation of Passengers in Greater New York by Continuous Railway Train, or Moving Platforms.  Argument in favor of equipping the East River Bridges, and connecting subway to Bowling Green, Manhattan, with a continuous railway train or Moving Platforms. It was prepared by Schmidt & Gallatin, of New York, and printed in 1903. (Oddly it is the pamphlet that I started working on directly after working through a 1903 double-brick volume of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.) It is only 20 pages long, but decorated with four folding plates, including two maps, and two drawings of the envisioned walkways. 

This seems a wonderful example of future thinking and city planning--but just not a very good idea.  It is hard to imagine a continuously moving sidewalk functioning in lower Manhattan. 

From the pamphlet: 

"Moving Platforms for the conveyance of passengers were recommended by Mr. Horace Greeley thirty years ago. They were successfully operated, first, at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, where 2,700,000 people were transported. In 1896 they were installed at the Berlin Exposition, and again at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where they carried over eight million passengers. Few persons know what Moving Platforms are. From the face that sometimes they are called " Moving Side- walks," it is believed that they must be some sort of a pavement on rollers, on which it is difficult to step with safety and maintain equilibrium. The Moving Platforms are to all intents a railway, operated like other railways, propelled by electricity, with cars, seats, motors, passenger stations, ticket booths, guards, electric lights — in fact, everything belonging to a first-class railway." 

"Where it differs from the ordinary railway is that the cars, or trains, are not running at intervals, but are coupled up continuously, so that there is no interruption of traffic at any time, but a large seating capacity at all times. It differs also in the construction of the cars, which are mere flat cars, provided with seats placed crosswise, and so arranged that all passengers face in the direction of motion. Each of these seats may be made wide enough to accommodate one, two or more persons. The most approved plan is to provide seats on one side of the cars only and leave the other for passengers to walk, thus giving them an opportunity to further accelerate their speed if they so desire..."

Rocket to the Moon, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2683

This is a king-hell cover for Popular Mechanics, appearing in March, 1930, and I was about to say it reminded me of other rocket ship designs from that era except that this one is actually earlier than those I was thinking of, which were generally technical and tech-pop.  When I read the article it turns out that this was a riff on the rocket that had just recently appeared in the Fritz Lang movie, Die Frau im Mond ("Woman in the Moon", October 15, 1929). The article was about the "realistic" nature of the film and the possibilities it displayed for actual space flight--as it turns out folks who know something about this genre contend that the Lang film may be the first serious sci-fi movie about sending people to the Moon.  

This looks somewhat like the design of a ship on the front cover of Raketenflug, by Rudolf Nebel . (Nebel. 1894-1978, was a very early member of the Raketenflugplatz, assistant to Hermann Oberth and very nearly the first to successfully conduct an experiment with a liquid-fueled rocket, beaten to the finish line by a man whose work he was not familiar with, Robert Goddard.  He defined right-wing in the Weimar era, and was part of a paramilitary organization called Stralheim; Wernher von Braun seems to have succeeded in the avenue that Nebel tried to travel along.  Nebel published this work in 1932, a year before the Nazi party came into power, and before his crotchety problems with the SA began.

And also like Otto Gail's ship: 

Gail (1896-1956)  was more a science journalist, popularizer, science fiction and fantasy writer than anything else, though his descriptions of preparations for launching a spacecraft to the Moon as well as the experiences of the crew were fairly lifelike.

And the original culprit (via Wiki):

 

Robot/Computer Anthropomorphic Brains

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2570 (continued)

There seems to be a developing thread in the stuff I've been saving on the history of anthropomorphic robots pre-1955 or so--and that is, the robotic or computer brain.  These are not nearly as plentiful as the robot-entire, or at least that is the way it seems from a general impression of long and sloppy reading in the area. I bumped into another brain post, this one still on the early-ish side, coming from Popular Science Monthly for 1930. It really is a stand alone, and an illustration for an advertisement for radios, but it still sent a message to the reader, and it seems that it probably was still very uncommon territory in the application of images like this:

That really is beginning to put the hot tube-scented "logic" into biological.  

Here's another, one that I wrote about some time ago, though this one has more the makings of a computer in place of some tubes and a dial.

This may well be the first public, popular, report on the Harvard Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) (appearing in the American Weekly, 15 October 1944), the first automatic, general-purpose, digital calculator.  Known as the MARK 1, it was the brainchild of Howard Aiken (1900-1973), a graduate student at Harvard, who started it all in 1937 by proposing a series of coordinated Monroe calculators to function as a unified whole  that would cross the threshold of the physically-impossible calculation (though theoretically possible) to the eminently doable. Here's a detail of the inset:

There are some others in the category, including this fine image from the Burroughs people:

The Burroughs Adding Machine company did about as much as anyone to objectify the worker in America during the 1880-1915 period, making the worker a part of a machine within the machine. In a way it was like creating the Ford assembly line for people sitting down. 

The company was founded on the work of William S. Burroughs' grandfather, William Seward Burroughs (1857-1898 and native son of Rochester, NY), who created a mechanical calculator to help him add long columns of numbers in his job as a bank clerk. American Arithmometer Company was founded by him and others in 1886, later evolving into Burroughs Adding Machine Company (1904), Burroughs Corporation (1953), and then into Unisys (combining with Sperry Univac in 1986) before sliding away.

In any event the adding machine connected millions of people to a mechanizing process of what had previously been a mental operation--the flywheel in the side of the head of the clerk/accountant in this add for Technical World (More Fascinating than Fiction) for August 1915 wasn't too terribly far from the truth. Interesting that on the other side of the head of this fellow, behind the other ear, is a pencil. 

Another in this line of depicting human brains as sort-of machines is this very entry-level bit of gearing in an advert for a tech correspondence school for folks to "modernize make more money", and found in  Popular Mechanics, August 1936. As these things go, it would be difficult to imagine a less complex depiction of a mechanical brain:

And another--again, this is not much of an electronic brain, but it does get across the point of the ad for the Alpha Corporation ("A subsidiary of Collins Radio Company") for 1958:

 

And yet another boundary is threatened with the astromatic panel concept of the Electrosnap corp (of Chicago), showing the interaction of biological and electronic systems, as shown in this advertisement in Missile and Rockets in 1959:

In any event, these are three of this developing collection of metalizing/electrifying the brain for its robot-y future.  

Cutaway of an Airship-based Hospital, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

"For people suffering from tuberculosis, or just from nerves, will physicians soon prescribe a trip to the clouds in a flying clinic hospital instead of a visit to the mountains?"  That was the leading sentence in the PSM issue on the flying clinic, appearing in July 1930.  The thinking was that if people were removed to high altitudes to get a "change in the blood" to being in such an atmosphere with a lot of sun, then the higher up, the better, And so the great airship hospital idea perked up for a few years, the idea getting a big boost from French physician Charles J. Juillot. who wrote on the benefits of a floating high-altitude clinic. The hospital/clinic ("aerial sanatorium" part of the airship would be situated on the top of the airship "like a big blister", the patients taking the sun under large celluloid windows, enjoying their stay for weeks at a time between re-supplies. 

Hospital airship, Popular Science Monthly, 1930: