JF Ptak Science Books

The Fossil Record of Duchampian Motion--an Early Image in Spatial Time (1884)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2747

This is one of those times where science precedes art--that's the least significant aspect of this image, as the folks seeing it in 1884 couldn't see into the future didn't know that they were looking at what may pass for prehistoric fossil record of Duchamp's 1912 Nude Descending.  The Duchamp would cause trial and occasional outrage in much of the artworld due no doubt to it challenging aesthetic--I don't know what the readers of the Compte Rendus thought when they saw this image, but I suspect it did not involve evaluating its artistic impact.

This is the work of Etienne Marey (who has made a number of appearances on this blog), a very smart and versatile guy who would go from physiology to cinematography to aerodynamics in the course of his life and be a leader/pioneer in each field.  Marey published this "strobophotograph" in his article "Analyse cinematique de la marche" in the Comptes Rendus on 19 May 1884--this was a brilliant effort in the analysis of human locomotion by making a dozen or two exposures on a single photo sheets of a reflective-outlined walking figure. This was different from Marey's birthyear and deathyear buddy, the other motion picture pioneer, Eadweard Muytbridge (1830-1904 for both). Marey introduced his "chronophotography" and studied aspects of movement and motion that had been dispersed to human history because of the inability to observe and record them--with Marey, that issue necessary for the beginning of real scientific discourse was to a large extent solved. 

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912, via Wikicommons

 There are more applicable Marey images for the Duchamp--for example his series on a single sheet of a naked woman descending a short set of stairs--but the image above has more aggregated motion in a confined space sense to it, so I'll stay with the sense-impressions than the more-visual ones. 

And here's Marey's  modeling of the action:

In any event, I just wanted to pass on this quick note on some seldom-seen Marey images...

Found-Art in Scientific Journals--Lonely Little Light (1926)

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There haven't been that many entries in the scientific journal found-art category on this site, and it seems that mainly the artworks found/noticed have occurred in the Annalen der Physik, Scientific American,  and Nature. Hunting for something else (as is usually the case) I found this lovely bit of design in Physikalische Zeitschrift, volume 26, 1926 (page 731, plate 5), illustrating an article by R. Seeliger on the electric arc, "Die Entwocklung des Lichtbogen". It isn't so much that the image itself is interesting for the sake of found-art--rather it is its placement, and the lack of almost anything else, and the pleasure of it being surrounded by pretty much nothing that makes this image so artful (or at least noticeable) to me. 

There is a bit of an unusual history about the priority of discovery of the electric arc, though that notice usually goes to Humphrey Davy in 1802 and 1809. There was earlier work in 1802 by Vasily Petrov (d. 1834), but even at the time his experimentation was obscure and not much shared. I only mention this because of the line that leapt from the "page" of the Wiki entry for him, saying  "...soon after his death he fell into oblivion in Russia", which seems pretty harsh to me, however true it may be.

The Great Passaic Textile Strike of 1926--H.L. Mencken's copy

 JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2705

This broadside was an appeal to like-minded people to contribute to a fund to help relieve thew dire conditions of textile worker strikers in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1926.  There were more than 16,000 people involved in this sometimes-brutal strike, people who were trying to stay even in their lives, looking for a little more money and a little better working conditions than what they had.  The Passiac (a working city just south of Patterson in an industrial triangle section of the state) strikers were moving against a number of textile (wool and silk) mills there, trying to force management to pay them something closer to the $1400 annual income for a family of four to survive. \

Most workers there were making $1,000-$1,200 a year ($800-$1,000 if the worker was a woman, and about half of them were) for 50+ hours of labor per week.  The result was that the workers could not afford good housing and food, and those disadvantages paid off in high rates of tuberculosis, very high incidence of child mortality, and a low average life expectancy.  The strike began slowly in January 1926, with the mills responding with vicious attacks by paid thugs and by police. 

[Measures 8.5x14"]

There's quite  a bit written on this strike, and most seem to say that it was an important event in the history of "labor relations", and that it was the first time that a Communist-led strike succeeded in the United States, (There is a complex legacy as to who the leadership was for this strike, but the end result is that, at the end, the Communists were in charge.)

But what I wanted to say here about this broadside was the communal effort involved with keeping the strikers (and the strike) going.  The strikers needed money to live, as there was certainly no money coming in, and since there was obviously no union, there was no general fund from which any of these families could draw food money from). they needed money just to buy food and pay for housing.  SO the call for "Give all you can!" and "Give right away!" were as desperate as they sounded.  My guess is that there would be a representative of the International Workers Aid society national office going from factory to factory, or door-to-door, soliciting for money for the Passaic workers' relief.  The strike was no doubt a very nasty business, with a victory only a victory once there was more food on the table, less illness, and far fewer babies dying from preventable causes. Probably this looked like a victory to others so far as the future of fair labor/pay was concerned, but not so much for the strikers who brought this about. 

It is also interesting to note that this copy was given at some point to H.L. Mencken, who gave it right away to the Library of Congress, where it wound up in a forgotten "Pamphlet Collection", and then sold to me (years afterwards).

This broadside was an appeal to like-minded people to contribute to a fund to help relieve thew dire conditions of textile worker strikers in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1926.  There were more than 16,000 people involved in this sometimes-brutal strike, people who were trying to stay even in their lives, looking for a little more money and a little better working conditions than what they had.  The Passiac (a working city just south of Patterson in an industrial triangle section of the state) strikers were moving against a number of textile (wool and silk) mills there, trying to force management to pay them something closer to the $1400 annual income for a family of four to survive. \

Most workers there were making $1,000-$1,200 a year ($800-$1,000 if the worker was a woman, and about half of them were) for 50+ hours of labor per week.  The result was that the workers could not afford good housing and food, and those disadvantages paid off in high rates of tuberculosis, very high incidence of child mortality, and a low average life expectancy.  The strike began slowly in January 1926, with the mills responding with vicious attacks by paid thugs and by police. 

[Measures 8.5x14"]

There's quite  a bit written on this strike, and most seem to say that it was an important event in the history of "labor relations", and that it was the first time that a Communist-led strike succeeded in the United States, (There is a complex legacy as to who the leadership was for this strike, but the end result is that, at the end, the Communists were in charge.)

But what I wanted to say here about this broadside was the communal effort involved with keeping the strikers (and the strike) going.  The strikers needed money to live, as there was certainly no money coming in, and since there was obviously no union, there was no general fund from which any of these families could draw food money from). they needed money just to buy food and pay for housing.  SO the call for "Give all you can!" and "Give right away!" were as desperate as they sounded.  My guess is that there would be a representative of the International Workers Aid society national office going from factory to factory, or door-to-door, soliciting for money for the Passaic workers' relief.  The strike was no doubt a very nasty business, with a victory only a victory once there was more food on the table, less illness, and far fewer babies dying from preventable causes. Probably this looked like a victory to others so far as the future of fair labor/pay was concerned, but not so much for the strikers who brought this about. 

It is also interesting to note that this copy was given at some point to H.L. Mencken, who gave it right away to the Library of Congress, where it wound up in a forgotten "Pamphlet Collection", and then sold to me (years afterwards).

TubePunk--Electronics Returns from War (1946)

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Of the numerous things that "won the war" for the Allied forces--besides Churchill, and Roosevelt, and millions of Soviet soldiers, and Eisenhower, and V Bush, and cracking Enigma and MAGIC, and the enormous production capacity of the U.S., and so on--there was "also" the warm electrical/dusty scent of active vacuum tubes, which somehow always remind me of "precision". The importance of RADAR I think cannot be overstated, plus SHORAN, and the Harvard Mark I, directional finders, and etc., all combined into a massive electronic war-winning effort that certainly helped define victory in WWII.  

This is sorta what I was thinking about when I saw this lovely Concord Radio catalog for 1946--the enormous vacuum tube in which various military ops were happening, and then the troops marching out of it on the bottom, back into civilian life, carrying the promise of the new electronic world with them to home, industry, and business, and that electronics was here to stay.  Another "here to stay" thing here was the female worker--if you look closely at the crowds returning to their lives-left-behind there is no shortage of women, which I think was pretty progressive for 1946.  

Dramatic Cutaway / Cross Sections of Two Great RAF Fighter Planes (1939)

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Here's an interesting and artistic cutaway of two of the great planes of the R.A.F., the Hawker "Hurricane" and the Vickers "Spitfire" (appearing in Popular Mechanics, 1939):

A Tunnel Long in the Making (1881)

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This is an interesting addition to the collection (though not designated as a category) of several dozen cross section/tomographic/cutaway technical and medical illustration posts to this blog, though this one has a more complicated and perhaps more tragic history than most. It depicts work being done on the ill-fated Hudson River tubes, which began life as a project in 1874 with construction starting in 1878; unfortunately there were at least three different companies that undertook the difficult project before going bust, and there was also one major disaster in 1883 in which more than 20 workers were killed.  The project got underway for the final time in 1899, and was opened to traffic in 1908.  In the top image workmen are installing a shielding that would later be abandoned, working I think via one electric spark lamp at upper left; below we see a casson in which a number of laborers were, that being sunk lower and lower as the excavations proceed.  

These two images are about-life size from when they appeared in Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), on 29 January 1881--though they no doubt appeared a few months earlier in Harper's Weekly or Scientific American or some such.  

 

Mechanization Taking Command in a Robotic Carpark (1921)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2656

There are many instances of assembly-line manufacturing before Henry Ford, but none were nearly as complete and extensive and done on such a large scale as the principle and practice he established in 1913.  The idea became generalized and (to a degree) fashionable, and the practice started being implemented in many other business wide and narrow.  To a certain extent that applies to this parking garage proposal that appeared in Popular Mechanics in December 1921. the effect of this idea here is the introduction of the building-as-robot, though the idea in this form didn't yet exist, nor did the term "robot". In any event the building took care of the customer's car once the car had been driven in--attendants would drive the car to an access point for a conveyor and perhaps an elevator, and deliver the car to its designated slot, much in the same ways some libraries operate in storing some of their more obscure books.  

I guess that "Taylorism" works its way in there, too. Frederick Winslow Taylor (born in 1856 but dead already at this point by six years) introduced a study of business in his Principles of Scientific Management, and that was a synthesis of humans with their environment and tasks to produce a more business-harmonious utilization by increasing the workers' productivity  via time/use studies, making the worker more a part of the business machine, and in a sense a Borg-like part of a techno-human robotic industry.  Among other things Taylor discovered to the hatred of hundreds of thousands of laborers that the short-handled shovel (villainized in the Song "Big Rock Candy Mountain") was the better tool to use in many shoveling tasks even though the thing itself is a back-breaker that no worker would choose to use.  Anyway, int eh history of robots, both of these bits deserve some attention. 

[Source, Popular Mechanics, December 1921, vol 36, p 751.]

A Warehouse of Locomotives: Baldwin Works, 1884

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There's a definite real-or-imagined synesthesic olfactory reaction to this image--for me, at least.  The ceiling seems a little low for what's going on inside this building, and none of the skylights seem to be open, and the windows in the walls don't seem to be letting much air in, which means that there is probably a high order of oil and carbon and other hammering smells going on here, locomotives being assembled/fixed check-to-jowl. It looks to be about 12/15 locomotives in one stage of completion or another in this structure, which means that there must've been 100-200 engineers and workmen in there too.  The Baldwin Works--pictured here in a detail of the front page of the Scientific American for May 31, 1884--is shown at a very strong point in U.S. railroad development, and there's nothing quite like an image like this that spells out "work" than something like this. 

 

An Elegant-Looking Torpedo Boat, 1887

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This is the design for two sister torpedo boats, created by Yarrow & Co. (Poplar, East London) in 1887 for the Spanish government. The torpedo boat was not a terribly-new idea by this point, the first "modern" version of the craft built in 1875 (HMS Lightning), with earlier versions launched during the U.S. Civil War (like the CSS David). The designs shown here are for the Azor and the Halcon,135' of attack-capacity (with 1600 hp), certainly making them high consideration for the folks on the receiving end, leading to the development of the torpedo boast destroyers to protect the big battleships and hunt the torpedo boats, and idea that would lead to "destroyers". In any event, I found the image attractive and interesting, and thought I'd share it:

[Image will become clearer when expanded/Source: The Engineer, October 21, 1887.]

The Majesty of Gears and Bolts--the Poe Locks, 1896

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The Soo Locks at Sault (the "soo" of "Soo") Ste. Marie are the four parallel locks that connect Lake Superior with Lake Huron and thus the rest of the Great Lakes--the Poe Locks, designed by O.M. Poe, are on of the four, and when it was completed in 1896 it was the world's largest. At 800'x100' they were enormous, and controlled the displacement of a lot of water, and the illustrations below show some examples of the meat of the engineering that controlled that process.   I have these loose engravings from an unfortunately unidentified source (though they are from a U.S. Lake Survey,between 1898-1909) and decided to share them because of their deep engineering beauty.  They are fantastically-rendered objects, filled with steam and grease and huge amounts of The Heavy Stuff, all of which display a remarkable feat of engineering.  

The images are clearer when you click and expand....

Cross Section of a German U-Boat, 1915

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I have paged through the entire Illustrirte Zeitung for the war years 1914-1918 and I' noticed a number of naval works by the illustrator and painter Willy Stower, but I do not recvall offhand any other cross sections, which is why the image below struck me so. Stower's (1864-1931) drawing appears in the September 7, 1915 issue of the magazine, and depicts one of the early German U-Boats.  [Evidently the U-65 began its career in 1916, and registered at 226'--this rendition doesn't look like it would be as big as this, and I'm not sure then what we are looking at...] 

Pistol- and Rifle-Cameras, 1884

JF Ptak 

There is an origin certainly for the reference to "shooting" fil or "shooting" a movie and such, and I think that it is fair to say that the following two illustrations of photographic innovations will explain that origin.  The first is E. Enjalbert's "photo-revolver", a woodcut and explanation of which appeared in Scientific American (""A Photographic Revolver for Amateurs" ) May 17, 1884.  It really is an ingenious thing:  the lens of the camera was located in the barrel (#2) with the camera apparatus in section "H"; the photo-sensitive plates (life sized at #3), are both pushed forward and down with the action of the trigger/hammer.  It is a snappy design. On the other hand I don't think I'd want to actually use the thing in an urban environment, as there might not be time for an explanation that "this is a ....". 

 

(From the signature at bottom right of teh wood engraver this was no doubt published earlier in La Nature.)

 

And then there's the great Etienne Marey's "Fusil Photographique", as it appeared in La Nature in 1882, which was an early and significant step in the development of cinematography, though again a highly problematic and time-invasive explanation out in public might escape the user:

If there was any debate on the origin of the above-mentioned phrase, this might sway it.  

A City on a Mis-named Martian Moon, 1927.

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This fine image from Popular Mechanics (January 1927) imagines the Martian moon "Ganymeade", mentioning that it is only 7 miles around, and could hardly host a large city, which the artist imagined in this free-for-all concept piece.  I like the idea of putting the size of the moon in perspective like this--I must say that I've never seen one quite like this. But first, the magazine identifies the Martian moon as "Ganymede", which is actually a Jovian moon. The moons of Mars are Phobos and Deimos (the names meaning panic/terror and terror/dread), and they are 13.8 miles and 7.8 miles, respectively. They were discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall at the National Observatory, and there wasn't a "Ganymede" between them--weirdly and wonderfully, though, their existence was imagined by non other than Jonathan Swift, who had his Laputan astronomers discover two moons in Gulliver's Travels in 1726. But no  Ganymede.   As it turns out, Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, and is nearly the size of Mars, so maybe that is where the confusion started.  

Anyway, this is a great image: 

The Dawn of the Robots

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Well, this is not anywhere near the first image of a pulley, not anywhere close--I don't even know when that might have appeared in a manuscript in the 9th century or whatever--but it is certainly a very attractive gang of pulleys.  It occurs in Robert Fludd’s (1574-1637), Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia (1617), and in it I see Hero/Heron of Alexandria (10-70 ACE), who I always associate with the pulley, and of course with his famous inventions, which in some respect are early forms of 'robots". In this image, the pulley-robot of some complex means is operating the "drive element" and producing (still) the necessary energy to produce change. And--this is a fine image.

[Source:  University of Utah,http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/naturae/id/1587/show/1265/rec/1]

A Fine, Hand-Held Adding Machine, 1869

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I found this wonderful ad in the July, 1869 issue of American Agriculturalist--in real life the woodcut is about 1.5"x 4" and was designed well enough to attract the attention of a practicing farmer needing arithmetical help. It was an intelligent design and speaks well of the readership. The adder--patented just a year earlier by Charles Henry Webb (1834-1905)--would have a long life in various incarnations, a history of which can be found in this excellent article at History-Computer.com (http://history-computer.com/CalculatingTools/Gadgets/Webb.html)