JF Ptak Science Books

Technology as Language: the Kindle & Edison's Phonograph

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 894

My wise friend Jeff Donlan wrote me the other day about being momentarily stopped in his tracks on hearing a friend saying that they were reading their (news)paper on a kindle. Being a bookman and a librarian, his mind’s eyebrows were raised at the irony of the digital “paper”, and then pressed on.  Kindle may well be on its way to transforming our concept of the “paper” part of “newspaper” and paper –printed books in general, and again may be the biggest leap in the transformation of the distribution of knowledge since the beginnings of the mass popularization of the internet. I wonder if kindle-esque innovations will put and keep the word “paper” in quotation marks (or in a Maris-like asterisk*) and place paper-based info distribution into the antiquarian’s domain. Seems that this is the natural order, a steady progression, to make communication among our kind simpler—and if not more simple, then providing more data with greater ease than previously imagined.  And I’m not talking here about discussing some sort of massive abecedary, working from Ugaritic proto-Canannite pre-Phoenician pre-Greek- alphabet and so on; just an outline of the major deals:  moving from spoken word like Thucydides oceanic memorization and recitation of the Greek cultural cornerstones of the Iliad and Odyssey) to dramatic traditions to written stories to Medieval copyists to woodblock printing to movable type¹ to, well, what, the internet?  And then to kindle-like machines?  

But before the modern kindle there was perhaps a kindle-like precursor that snakes its way in history to (at least) the very capable hands of Thomas Edison, who in a furious few years in the mid 1870’s² invented the light bulb and the phonograph³ (the later coming as a direct byproduct on work done on the telephone and telegraph).. He celebrates his phonograph in the North American Review (May 1878)⁴ and then lists what he saw as the readymade faits acomplis of the phonograph, the first of which was weirdly/spectacularly worded:   “1. The captivity of all manner of sound-waves heretofore designated as fugitive, and their permanent retention.”  Do you hear a soundtrack with that description?  I did.  He proceeded with less fanfare: “2. Their reproduction with all their original characteristics at will, without the presence or consent of the original source, and after the lapse of any period of time. 3. The transmission of such captive sounds through the ordinary channels of commercial intercourse and trade in material form, for purposes of communication or as merchantable goods. 4. Indefinite multiplication and preservation of such sounds, without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source. 5. The captivation of sounds, with or without the knowledge or consent of the source of their origin.”

Edison then goes on to list what he saw as distinct “possibilities” for the use of the phonograph in the not-too-distant future. There are ten major prospects, the “bookish” aspect and the first major assault on the way we read is listed fourth (though he wasn’t necessarily weighting his list in any way).  Some of the others in this list (all of which cam to fruition) include: 1.Dictation and letter writing—using the phonograph to record letters and correspondence, which was baldly aimed at the business and corporate trade as the machine was relatively difficult to operate and expensive. 2  Phonographic “books”. I noticed that that Edison did not change the word “book” in any way, even though the book is no longer there with the application of the phonograph, just the read and spoken words.  “Books may be read by the charitably-inclined professional reader, or by such readers especially employed for that purpose, and the record of such book used in the asylums of the blind, hospitals, the sick-chamber, or even with great profit and amusement by the lady or gentleman whose eyes and hands may be otherwise employed; or, again, because of the greater enjoyment to be had from a book when read by an elocutionist than when read by the average reader.” 3. Family records. “For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family [emphasis mine] as of great men the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph.”4. Toys:  “A doll which may speak, sing, cry, or laugh, may be safely promised our children for the Christmas holidays ensuing. Every species of animal or mechanical toy such as locomotives, etc. may be supplied with their natural and characteristic sounds.”

Edison continued, writing on the phonograph’s application for the study of elocution, speaking clocks, language preservation (as in documentation of the proper way of speaking a certain language, something that would’ve come in handy in the spike of disappearing languages at the end of the 19^th century), telephone recorders and pedagogical lessons.

But this is all a little far afield from the kindle aspect. Is the development of things like the kindle another step in the metaphorical development of a technological alphabet?  Like developing an alphabet for a language, where there are a finite numbers of symbols that elegantly possess the capacity to transmit all of the words of a spoken language, is there a corollary for something that makes systemic sense for the technological transmission of knowledge? I guess the question would be whether the development of the kindle (and so on) provides another step towards the completeness of what now stands as a chaotic environment of information and knowledge distribution?=I don’t think that there is yet a driving, poetic sense to these new technologies. The new media provide the means to information but not necessarily the way to it.  They also don’t lend themselves to memorization, which in the old semi-mnemonic days was a way to not only record info but also to help understand it by enforcing prolonged exposure and thought.  With as much data that is daily available, perhaps new information is simply filling memory holes on the vast hole-ridden plane that is the fabric of the new way of gathering information.  I have little doubt that in the next revolutionary step in this whole process will be more knowledge-based than suffering under the weight of primitive search-engine-based data retrieval of today.  I’d say that once the alphabet of technology is more complete, and that the issues of search, organization, storage and retrieval makes more sense, that it may well then leave paper behind.  And perhaps after the power and elegance of having a knowledge system like this that the next giant step would be not having the devices simply with us, but in us.

Notes

1. It is interesting to note that among the first items printed on movable type presses were  packs of tarot cards and religious indulgences (get-out-of-hell cards).

2. For an annotated chronology of some of Edison’s career see HERE.

3.Edison presented his invention at the offices of the Scientific American in New York City, the magazine reporting the event in its  22 December 1877 issue: "Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night." Edison applied for his patent for the highly original invention on 24 December, receiving it on 19 February 1878 (patent # 200,521). He would soon lose interest in this invention and move onto other big things (inventing, for example, the biopolar dynamo in the next year); it would be Emile Berliner (1851-1929, and who invented the microphone in this same year) to improve the phonograph and make it more affordable and accessible and increase its utility immeasurably. 1877 also saw the publication of Rayleigh’s superb Theory of Sound and Boltzmann’s revision of the second law.

4. Source here.

Of further interest:

For general browsing in 19^th century journals see the invaluable Library of Congress contribution

Rutgers houses the Edison papers here.

"Clocks Which Will Talk: The Wonderful Possibilities of Edison's Invention." New York Sun (April 28, 1878). TAEM 25: 173-174.

"The Phonograph and Its Future." Scientific American Supplement 124 (May 18, 1878): 1973. TAEM 25: 269.

"The Phonograph and Its Future." North American Review 126 (May-June 1878): 527-536. Reprinted widely. TAEM 25: 198-199.

"To the Editor." New York Tribune (June 8, 1878): 5.

"The Phonograph and Its Future." Telegraphic Journal 6 (June 15, 1878): 250. TAEM 25: 265.

"To the Editor." New York Tribune (June 27, 1878): 5. Reprinted in Engineering [see below]. Not selected.

 

Examination Photos, 1895-1943

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 891

I suddenly found myself with a short virtual stack of interesting early-century photos featuring examinations of one sort or another.  There's nothing here for exams at school (which makes me think about when the first graded school test was invented), but there are some other interesting images of exams.

For example, there's this odd picture of two guys inspecting the installation of a voting booth in Chicago in 1905.  There's nothing wrong with this, no sir, not since we're in Chicago, which never has had any sort of voting irregularity--perhaps that's why I get such a creepy feeling from this image.

This picture has everything going for it in a fabulous way, from the poses of the tester and the examiner (who is standing in a Hitchcockian manner, a thin man in a fat man pose) to the row of cups, to the size of the spittoon, to the slightly dirty and occasionally chipped cups, to the title of the whole thing.  Mincing Lane.  I understand and commend the need for quality control, but the picture does have its odd elements.  (I'd like to know the name of the interpids pictured here; or, rather, their nicknames.)

Evidently the men aboard the USS Brooklyn  had little to do during unspecified doldrums than to watch and critique the ship's barber.

 

Then there are the professional barber-and-haircut-watchers, shown here at a barbering school examination in 1903:  five crowded chairs and a few men in hats.

 

The big, white, filled-but-lonely room at Ellis Island, where you either got in, got quarantined, or got sent back home.

I'm not sure what this nurse is doing.

This nurse is administering an exam to a newcomer at one of the American Japanese internment/prison camps sometime around 1943.

 

There are undoubtedly many more of course, but that's the lot available on the desktop right now.
 

"Irish Tommies", German-Conquered England, and Loyalties

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 888

In the heavy mist of the Civil War, where brother fought brother, there was another sort of fratricide, of countrymen removed from their homes, finding themselves in America and there fighting against one another in opposition. Such is the case of the Irish in the American Civil War, where 180,000 of the immigrants fought in the war, with 30,000 fighting in butternut, and 150,000 fighting in blue.   The Irish faced one another across battlefields like of Appomattox, Malvern Hill, and especially Antietam, along the Sunken Road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was thinking about the American Irish of New York and Pennsylvania and Louisiana and Texas of 1864 while looking at this Underwood & Underwood New Photo Service photograph of the “Irish Tommies” of WWI.  It shows a large group of Irishmen displaying their trophies taken from Germans, and dated 18 July 1917. This was also a period of terrific change and hardship, what with the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic (24 April 1916) having taken place just a year earlier

 

I don’t know what it meant to be Irish and fighting with the Brits during the war, during this time of Trouble and upheaval (the enemy of my enemy bit come to mind).  It is interesting to see this piece by Sinn Feinist and Irish Republican Robert Lynd in the Irish War News, “If the Germans Conquered England”, and making elegantly and cleverly making the case of superior similarity between the British in Ireland and the Germans in England.  I know it is far off the mark to think about black slaves

owned by the Cherokees sold into service to fight for the Confederacy, but maybe not so very far off....

(Irish War News source)

Read the full text by Robert Lynd IF THE 
GERMANS CONQUERED ENGLAND, AND 
OTHER ESSAYS Printed by George Robert, Dublin, 1917.

 

The article begins:

"When a small tradesman applies for exemption from military service on the ground that his business would be ruined by his absence, a question that is often put to him is: "What do you think will happen to your business if the Germans win the war ? " As a rule the tradesman does not know what to think. He has no means of measuring world-catastrophes. He has not Dr. Johnson's short way with questions to which there is no answer. In the first place, the small tradesman does not believe in the possibility of a German victory. In the second place, he has not the slightest idea what would happen to his business as the result of one. Perhaps, however, he knows as much about the matter as the members of the tribunals. All of us know that a German victory which involved the conquest of England would make life intolerable for Englishmen until the conquest was undone. But as to its effect on small businesses, that is another matter. It is quite possible that the little grocery, the little tobacco-shop, and the confectioner's would be able to hold up their heads under German rule as under English. The valid argument against a German conquest is not that it would make an end of the small business man ; it is that it would make an end of a free England. If it could be proved that a German conquest would add twenty-five per cent, to the incomes of all Englishmen, even that would not make it tolerable. Most men in all nations are ready to sacrifice their lives in order that their country may be free."

 

On the History of Normalcy: Oskar Sclemmer & Dance, 1927

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 876 

Jean Bouillard (the famous physician), Joseph de Lalande (astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory), the Paris Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, Jacques Babinet, and the University of Bologna are examples of people and entities sharing something fantastically uncomfortable—they all ridiculed the initial presentations of what would become some of the most magnificent achievements of the last 500 years.  Bouillard incredibly and improbably insisted that Edison’s phonograph was impossible and a hoax, Lalande thought it utterly impossible to fly, the Paris Academy found it absurd that steam could be applied to locomotion, the French Academy rejected Lavoisier’s findings that meteorites do indeed come from space, and the great Bologna spat on the idea of Galvani’s researches. So it goes.  There are thousands and thousands of cases like these.  Jenner, Semmelweis, Galileo, Harvey, Copernicus—all produced monumental achievements, and all faced incredible scorn and rebuke. Some had it even worse than this: Dante, Marco Polo, Walter Raleigh, Cervantes, Cellini, Voltaire, Pushkin, Turgenyev, Dostoyevsky, Baudilaire, Verlaine, Machiavelli, and etc.(and Galileo) not only found vast rejection, but were also imprisoned. (Some actually produced works in prison that would also be rejected: Raleigh wrote his history of the world in the White Tower, Pushkin, Eugene Onyegin; Marco Polo, his travels.  Plato of course was also sold as a slave.) This list in general could go on and on--an encyclopedia of mistaken thought and stubbornness could easily be produced from centuries of thought like this, thinking that went outside the boundaries of “normalcy”. 

 

The funny thing about “normalcy” is that all it seems to measure is the time it takes to move from one state of “normalcy” to the next.  People should know better than to expect that there should be no periods of extended non-change.

It is interesting to think about how new ideas like these are perceived.  I came to think about this searching for a picture of the wire costume for the black series in Oskar Schelmmer’s (1888-1943, designer, artist, dancer and by 1923 the Master of Form at the Bauhaus) Triadic Ballet ("Triadisches Ballett”)¹ of 1927. Better than a still, I actually found clips of the dance on youtube, which just floors me.

I imagine that Schlemmer didn’t find a very happy reception to his dance and costumes.  He was outside the sphere of even those re-inventing dance in Germany in the early 1920’s.  His concept of movement, among other things, differed from those of the other pioneers of this period, people like Mary Wigman, Francois Delsarte, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban—his inspiration came not from the center of the dancer’s experience, but from the costume itself, “which eliminates the torso” and “which the dancers measure out rather than feel out or explore”². 

It is phenomenal to me to see these changes in dance in such a short time, and how much of this movement would have been nearly impossible to conceive as an art form only a decade or so earlier. Except to the minority of people like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, who had already rejected the restricting forms of classical ballet—the work of Schlemmer must’ve felt like a lightning strike.

 

1. See this on Musikperformance.

2..From Germany in the Twenties, the artist as Social Critic, a Collection of Essays, 1980, pg. 91.

The Battle of Berlin, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 869

 

Well, it wasn’t really a battle, but the Nazi government was getting ready for one. As reported in this 30 March 1935 issue of The Illustrated London News.  There was an elaborate preparedness drill conducted in the Kreuzberg district of south Berlin ten days earlier—“the most realistic air raid exercises ever planned”. 

The Germans attacked themselves with scores of low flying planes that dropped “deafening” false bombs; meanwhile the streets were swirling with gases that smelled like poison gas, cars were blaze, abandoned buildings were lit up with pyrotechnics, and there were heaps of rubble here and there.  The population not otherwise engaged in defense measures were all sent to evacuation shelters and centers.  There were drills for gas attacks and subsequent decontamination, firefighting, saving people from collapsed buildings, caring for children and the elderly, aid stations, medical triage, and so on.  Anti-bombing measures were also taken for nighttime raids, with blackouts, and general light-lessening measures on all levels and quarters—for example, streetlights and street sign lamps were replaced with much lower wattage bulbs.  It looks like it was a pretty big event--I’ll have to check my Illustriete Zeitung/Leipzig for the German coverage.

 

Without being an historian of the 1930’s preparations for war defense, it seems to me that there was an awful lot of this going on in England, France and Germany through most of the decade.

[The illustration above is a charming overstatement of the obvious, right down to the little flaglettes on either side of the (500-pound ?) bomb.  The sign reads "Closed Thoroughfare//Danger to Life" (sorta).

I doubt that there would be that much need for a sign or flags, but if I was going to use anything at all I might place it a little further away from the unexploded device.  (I can just imagine people inching forward to be able to read what the relatively small print on the sign actually said...)

 

At this point it may be interesting to have a look at an older post here on the creation of the false Paris.    

Found Dadaist Art--Floating Eyes and Ears, 1650 & 1807

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 857

I’ve written a few times in this blog (here, here and here) about what I think is found/unintentional antiquarian Dadaist art and would like today to continue that thread with the following two unusual pieces of art.

The first is a detail from the title page of Joseph de Casanova’s Primera parte del arte de escrivir todas formas de letras (1650). This is not the Casanova (Giacamo, 1725-1798) who most people would initially think of—the seductive womanizer of the 18^th century—but another, earlier, Spanish Casanova (1613-1692) who was important in the history of round hand script and the lettera bastarda.  Joseph Casanova ‘s evolutionary handwriting style was considerably lighter and easier than most styles, and his influence in changing handwriting practices was substantial.  What is interesting for me is the detail at the bottom of the engraved title page for his book, the emblem containing  “Labore et Constantia”.  Labor and consistency, decorated with a hand and compass, ever watching and listening with ears and eyes above and below.

[This design comes from (at least) one earlier source—the printer’s device for Christoph Plantijn (Antwerp, 1583), though without the eyes (below).] I like the floating aspect of the disembodied body parts, floating in their little sea of constancy, ruled by a compass. 

 The second image has another set of disembodied eyes/ears (among other things) and has all the flavor of the dada/surrealist flourishes of the frammenti of Piranesi. This comes from Bernhard von Montfaucon’s Greichische, Romische und andere Alterthuemer… (Nurenberg, 1807). When taken out of context, as a disembodied image, the von Montfaucon certainly has a dadaist taste for me, especially if you edit the image a little.

 

Emerging Patterns and Hidden Visible Art

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 851  Blog Bookstore

Even when I know that this picture is coming, when it is rounding the bend, I still can’t see it for the portrait it is supposed to be.  The lithograph is by Berthold Loeffler (1874-1960), a prolific Viennese designer, artist and professor at Kunstgewerbeschule (1907-1935) whose prodigious commercial

output covered about every other letter of the artistic alphabet.  This work is a portrait of his mostly-forgotten fellow-Viennese writer, Peter Altenberg¹ for the Kabaerett Fledermaus of 1909.  The portrait is all squares and one big button to me, and I have to consciously look for the rest of the picture in spite of knowing that the stuff is there. 

It is an unusual picture of emergent art—for me not quite like, for example, the cover of the pamphlet Cinema by J. Epstein, where the letters are a jumble for just a moment and then snap into view.  The Loeffler portrait is much more densely hidden in a much more straightforward manner, and fools my mind every time. 

 Notes

1.Altenberg is probably a product of his time, or a time of his product.  Described as the bohemian’s bohemian, he lived an outre lifestyle in little cafes and bars, wearing capes and broad-brimmed hats, and was evidently something of an effeminate womanizer with a very deep interest in very young girls.  There you go.  Altenberg stood quite high in that world, as Alban Berg put some of his postcard-poetry to music in his Five songs on picture postcard texts by Peter Altenberg, which caused a near-riot in its premier, abruptly stopping the performance which would not see the light of day again for another 40 years.

Found 17th Century Dadaist Art

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 827  Blog Bookstore

I found these iconographic images by Ottavio Scarlattini¹ (1623-1699) simply irresistible--and even though I really don’t quite understand them (at least in their correct and original sense and intention), lost to me as they are to a more classical education and deeper understanding of Baroque symbolism, I can imagine plenty of re-iconographized (?!) meanings.  Not having a more specialized knowledge to understand their published intentions perhaps allowed them to have a  strangely modernistic pull on me, making many of these Scarlattini designs seem more Dadaist than a 17^th century work displaying visual characterizations of morality tales wrapped around human anatomy. .  If  you changed the vocabulary to interpret this artwork—or just simply removed its intention-- it changes its era, and moves very cleanly into the genre of the surreal.  It feels to me that this sort of transformation is not at all common, especially when you move the centuries and the genres so crisply and elegantly. 

Doesn’t the “Divinorum Neglectus” suggest something that could’ve been produced by  more-antiquarian versions of Raoul Haussmann or Hannah Hoech or Paul Delvaux?  It does me.  If you made this a three-dimensional piece it could feel like Ernst or Duchamp, its emblematic/hieroglyphic nature transforming before your eyes.    (I wonder if Duchamp or Dufuy were influenced by the iconographists from this period?)

This transference game works nicely with other emblem books, and even with some of the large and spare frescoes from Herculaneum when rendered in black and white as engravings...and also for some of the Framenti of Piranesi, but not too many other places in Western art.  Yes?

 

An engraving of a fresco from Herculaneum (printed ca. 1760):

Notes:
1. SCARLATTINI, Ottavio  HOMO ET EJUS PARTES, FIGURATUS ET SYMBOLICUS, ANATÓMICUS, RATIONALIS, MORALIS, MYSTICUS, POLITICUS, ET LEGALIS, COLLECTUS ET EXPLICATUS CUM FIGURIS, SYMBOLIS, ANATOMIIS. opera et studio R. D. Octavii Scarlatini,. nunc primum ex italico idiomate latinitati datum a R. D. Matthia Honcamp, (.). II volúmenes en un tomo. L. Heckenauer grabador, and printed in 1695.

 

Scarlattini produced one of the great masterworks of emblematic knowledge while at the same time writing on human anatomy and physiology. 

The entire book located here http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/camenaref/scarlattini.html

Odd Art Department: Art Brut in Advertising?

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 810  Blog Bookstore

 

There's not much in this illustration--the entire back page of an oversize pulbicity tourist pamphlet--to suggest any sort of professionalism, or training, or, well, ability.  But there it is, badly drawn, with unusual (if not bad) coloring, trying to entice people to visit this seaside resort in New Zealand. 

Maybe this is more “outsider art” than Art Brut.  Art Brut was a term used by Jean Dubuftet to describe raw/rough art produced by non-artists (and those mostly mental asylum residents¹).  Art critic Roger Cardinal coined “outsider art” as a English-language adaptation of the Dubuffet term², and has since come into use to describe unusual, technically naïve and unschooled Otherness of artworks.  This cover illustration is certainly bearing a pretty good-sized helping of otherness to it, from its pale, weird coloring to its basic inability to draw.  Somehow though it is attractive to me, and ultra-calming when it is not troubling.  It is just one of those peculiar works that is good and bad at the same time.

Notes:

1. A spectacular and early example of Art Brut is found in the phenomenally detailed, insightful-of-other-worlds work of  Adolf Wolfli.

2. "Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses - where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere - are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade." - Jean Dubuffet. Place à l'incivisme (Make way for Incivism). Art and Text no.27 (December 1987 - February 1988).

Portraits Within Portraits: Images of Exhaustion, Defeat and Old Youth

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 806  Blog Bookstore

Earlier today I made a post on some of the images in my collection of WWI News Service Photographs. (These were photos that were sold by an image agency to newspapers and journals which looked for stock photos of, well, whatever, and after paying a use fee would include the photo in the story they were reporting.)  This photo is one of three in a series that show German POWs being marched around a town in France and stopped here and there for a photo.  The picture was taken deep into 1918, within a month or two of the end of the war,.when the Germans were already defeated.  From the look of things, these soldiers were done: tired, mostly beaten, dirty. They at least had most of their buttons on their coats (which is actually a very big deal, keeping your overcoat closed in cold weather to keep warm and alive), their boots looked warn but intact, and they looked not terrible undernourished (though I doubt anyone in the group weighed more than 150 pounds).  

The group is bookended by two remarkable figures:  the soldier on the left looks not 16 or so, but with a not-new ground in toughness.  He's all smooth face and baby fat, though he has at least survived the grueling fighting.  The soldier on the right could be the prototype for any number of propaganda posters that popped up in Berlin in the early 1930's advocating the sold-out but not defeated German soldier of the Great War whose fate must be avenged. 

 Almost everyone was cupping a ciggy.

Lastly, the guy third from the left seems to be a Canadian guard, not that this group was going to try to escape.

Unusual Views, Continued: Looking Straight Down, Found-Dadaist, 1919

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 804  Blog Bookstore

The idea of representing a view straight down, of looking straight down from some height, is a relatively recent occurrence, this view being somewhat rare in the antiquarian world pre-balloon or pre-heavier-than-air flight.  The pre-human-flight reason for its scarcity is understandable, but even after the first Montgolfiers’¹ ascension in 1787, there’s another 120+ years of scarcity yet to come before these views would start to pop up in common (and uncommon) literature..  Now I’m not talking about cartography, which is basically a straight-down view of the world—what I’m referring to (and where I’ve posed a few time before in this blog, particularly here) is that same view but not as a map per se, but what you would see if you were dangling out of a plane or balloon.  The extraordinary map of Imola by Leonardo would certainly classify because of its you-are-there qualities:  essentially it would be like a bird’-eye or oblique view, but straight down.

I think that this view was avoided because (in pre-flight days) of the high imagination that it took to picture the view, and, secondly, because of how this view created its own special Flatland² and crunched, flattened, everything down to what becomes somewhat (and sometimes entirely) unrecognizable.  This point was just hammered home to me while trolling through an interesting book by Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg³. Biro makes a great find of unintended/found Dada illustration in the Berliner Illustriete Zeitung⁴ in which a photographer makes images of passing pedestrians, turning them into quite something else due to the squashed depth of field and non-perspective. The photos make the point perfectly of why artists might have avoided this straight-down perspective.  The Found Dadaist result is interesting in itself. 

[My apologies for so many hyphenated words in this post! Here’s some more in case the reader demands them: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -.]

Notes:

1. The two brothers launched 4 June 1783, just before the end of our Revolutionary War, rising up in a 37,000 cubic foot balloon of alum-coated taffeta.

2. Edwin Abbott’s fantastic and popular 1884 satire of English society, depicting the world of wants and desires in terms of a two-dimensional world structure (and desires for a three-dimensional existence).  Brilliant and simple; well, maybe not so simple.

3. The Dada Cyborg, Views of the New Human in Wiemar Berlin, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

4.  The issue for 29 December 1919.  This is the Berlin version of the weekly newspaper that I browse through, the Leipzig Illustriete Zeitung. 

The Bumpy Earth and the Loss of Perfection, 1543

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 800 

The idea of the Earth as a sphere is an ancient one, proved over and over again across the centuries, most famously proved by Aristarchus with a stick and a hole and a shadow. The idea of the Earth as perfect, as a perfect sphere, is an old belief wrapped in layers of hopeful scientific thought, God’s creation and the cradle of mankind necessarily being perfect (Summa aside).  This was a rigidly enforced perception and a religious assumption, just like the belief that the Earth was the center of this universe, and that a vacuum was a theological and therefore physical impossibility.  (See my post On the Discovery of Nothing.)

The woodcut illustrated here—a depiction of a robbed and medaled God lording over his creation—is interesting in its depiction of what seems to be a not-perfect sphere of the Earth. The planet is definitely not smooth around its perimeter, and the inclusion of three-dimensional mountain rendering accentuates this depiction, which to me seems all very novel.  The source for this image is given as a “Martin Luther Bible of 1543”, but that is wrong, unfortunately, which makes it less of a story.  If this woodcut was really done in 1543 it would’ve occurred in the same year as two monumental publications:  Nicolas Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), marking what is the birth of modern science.  (The print appeared in Luther's translation of the Bible in 1534.)

But offhand I don't see Luther's "Bible" for this year, and in general 1543 is not a good year in general for Luther so far as I’m concerned.  He busily published Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies ) and  Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (On the Holy Name and the Lineage of Christ), both of which were horrible anti-Semitic attacks, and worse.  For example, from the first work, he wrote that the Jews were a "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."^, and in the second wrote that it was not an immoral act for not killing Jews.  This really has nothing to do with the point of this post, but I just couldn’t let the reference to 1543 slide by without mentioning this very ugly tragedy of Luther’s  theology. 

A Question about Einstein and Missing (?) Modernism

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 799 

How much was Einstein affected by the many pieces of what was the greatest revolutionary period in history?  The period from, say the pre-Impressionists (1860 or so) to the period just after Cubism (again, say 1920), saw epochal changes across the sciences, medicine, the arts, literature….virtually everything. I cannot think of any period in intellectual history that approaches this 60-year period. Actually, the gargantuan changes can be shaved down to the period of Einstein’s living memory beginning with the stunning discovery of Roentgen’s x-rays in 1895 to the invention of non-representational painting in 1911¹.  Breathtaking, really. 

In all of this, I wonder how Einstein saw the vast changes that were not in the fields of physics or mathematics?  Poincare, Boltzmann, Planck were analyzed and understood and appreciated and etc.  But what about Strindberg, and Schoenberg, and Seurat, and Leger, and Joyce, and Malevich, and Duchamp, and Kandinsky, and Klee?  Einstein certainly loved music and had a deep understanding of it, but it was with Mozart and Bach that he found beauty.  The music of the sphere, the primum mobile, the hand of the creator, were found in these two men.  Beethoven was too melodramatic; Wagner (in 1939) was disgusting.  Others were just too simple, too light. 

I don’t know what he felt about Schoenberg, or Joyce, or Klee.  Perhaps they were too messy, too unstructured, too removed from the fundamentals of nature that he felt Mozart found and displayed.  I just don’t know. As the architect of one of the most fundamental changes in the history of science, I wonder if (and why) he stood so seemingly unaffected by so many of these other enormous changes.

Notes:

1.  There are a number of books that address these revolutionary changes, but only one, I think, that looks at the great broad swath of revolutionary activity across many fields:  William Everdell's The First Moderns (U Chic). A lovely book.

Pig Iron vs. Eiffel Tower: Visualizing Difficult Numbers and Concepts

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Several years ago I wrote about some triumphantly unusual images (plus one on the 1891 10-ton Eiffel Tower bullet) of the Eiffel Tower--today I'd like to add another, a queer image which manages to loose the Eiffel Tower (and the Great Pyramid) in representations of pig iron production.

 

I love comparison like this (which appeared in the Illustrated London News for 1910), representing big, hard-to-associate  numbers of something against another quantity that can be instantly understood--the relationship between the two might be tenuous and complex, but at least it can give you some sort of handle on what would normally be an inaccessible, stand-alone number. Plus, any time that you can show what an ungraspable concept might "look like" and be explainable to a 10-year-old, well, you've got something. 

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