JF Ptak Science Books

A Very Early (First?) Description of a Panoramic Daguerreotype (1845)

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Just five years after the announcement of Daguerre's invention of photography, and just four years after the beginning of the early photo craze, there appeared in the Comptes Rendus in mid-1845 a paper by Friedrich von Martens (1809-1875) on an expansive use of the new media: the panorama.  It was certainly the first paper to appear in this journal on the subject; when I checked a likely U.S. source on the subject (Journal of the Franklin Institute, 1846) I found only one mention prior to 1865: a translation of the Martens paper (recorded though as "Merteus"). This seems a little obscure but not unimportant, as Martens may have been either the second (and possibly first) to perfect a panoramic camera, patenting his "Megaskop Kamera" in 1844.

• I've decided to share the Martens paper in both the original and the American translation: 

• Here's the text version of the original article, from the Comptes rendus de l'Academie des Sciences..., Paris, June 23, 1845:

Found-Semi-Documentary Photography (Georgia, 1898)

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Sometimes “surprises” are quick to come to recognition, and sometimes they are slow, and sometimes they do a fast-creep into existence. The following surprise is a combination of the three—it may not have developed into the “something” I thought it nearly was, or is, but given the initial shock in seeing them, there probably is a “there”, there.

I'm speaking of the illustrations for what is mostly a benign work, Georgia, its Resources, Condition and Opportunities, Preliminary Pamphlet, which on the face of it has very high potential for boredom and nothingness. It was published though in Atlanta in 1898, which gives it some hope—it also had in a sub-sub-heading that it was sponsored by the “Georgia Immigration and Investment Bureau”, which breathes some life into the thing.

On opening the pamphlet immediately gave up its prize—photographs. And this was the first photo I saw:

Now I know this is supposed to be a propaganda piece for the state to attract money and people to come to Georgia, showing the abundances and state of agriculture as they were in 1898, which should have put a bright coat of shining sheen over whatever was to be pictured--but a photo like this had a very photo documentary effect, far more so than the photographer or editor ever intended it to be. It was a pride photo back in 1898, not an unblinking-photo-eye.

But the mystery is also the insight, something for us to consider 121 years into the future of these scenes which displayed what was supposed to be the Happy Normal. So the “Square Mile of Peaches” photo showing abundance seems to have the feel of an abundant silent crisis receding in its own mist, sinking into the short horizon.

And this:

What I wonder was the message in showing the formal but informal arrangement of the white and black people working together picking pears? “Integrated” is certainly not the word to use here—no doubt it was more like an agreement to perform some sort of work where the races were in close proximity with all race rules observed and maintained.

There were many photos lie this in the pamphlet—of the thirty or so in the pamphlet only these three emerge to tell a story differentiated from the work they illustrated.

They are Found-Semi-Social-Documentary images, sort of...I'm not sure, really what they are. They were certainly very different from what I expected, and in memory remind me a little of Annan, Mayhew, Hines, Riis, Parks, and Lange, but only by accident. They reveal something that is beyond the quickly posed environment.

They are a little mysterious in interpretation—and they were certainly a surprise.

 

The Dimming of the Harsh Light and the Beauty of Manual Work

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This slightly altered detail is from the central perspective of a photo of workers completing the base for a 10 million cubic foot gas tank¹ in Chicago, and appeared in the Scientific American on 23 January 1920. It is a great photo of the beginnings of a considerable project, and the full image (below) stands on its own as a visual accommodation of a segmented space soon to be occupied by something enormous. That said, the guy in the middle of it all caught my attention in all of this. Was he a standard laborer out of position amidst the 200-odd other people there as the shot was being made, wondering where it was he was supposed to be? Or was that a foreman, or somebody else with the freedom to walk around as the great mass fell into position to take care of the job at hand? 

Notes

1. It was a big tank: 10,000,000 cu ft is about 75,000,000 gallons, weighing in at about half-a-billion pounds, which is a lot. By spacing out the guys on the perimeter of the base I make it that the circumference of the structure was about 400'. 

 

Dark Lightning? (1899)

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William Lockyer experimented with photography and lightning to test an explanation of the apparent appearance of "dark lightning"--it is an interesting go and a great phrase that sounds like the name of a Marvel superhero. (William J.S. Locker, Dark Lightning Flashes”, in Nature, vol 60, no. 1563, pp 570-574 in the weekly issue of pp 565-588.) His evidence supports the hypothesis that the phenomenon had a photographic/chemistry cause rather than a physical one. The images he produced back there at the turn of the century were remarkable and beautiful. 

From the paper:

“IS there such a phenomenon as dark lightning? This is a question that has often been raised, and as yet no satisfactory answer has been given. If dark flashes do really occur, then they should probably be both seen and photographed, and the former, one would think, would be the more simple way of recording them.”

“If the lens of the camera be covered the moment after a flash has occurred the developed image will always come out bright, feebly or strongly, according to
circumstances. If, however, the plate be exposed after a flash has acted upon it, either to the continued action of a feeble diffused light or to the powerful glare arising from one or more subsequent flashes, then on development the image of the original flash will probably come out black. The effect is therefore not a meteorological or physical one, but purely chemical. It can be obtained, not only with a lightning flash, but also with a machine spark, or even with an ordinary flame. It is merely necessary that the plate should be exposed to the action of a certain amount of light after it has received the impression and before development.”

 

Five Good Questions on Mr. Daguerre's Process (1849)

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Antoine Francois Jean  Claudet, (1797-1867), began experimenting with Daguerreotype in 1840, and soon became photographer in ordinary to the Queen, being among the very first to practice Daguerrian portraiture in London. . He was very innovative and successful, and contributed many inventions and improvements in the cause of early photography, and was one of the first to use the collodion process.  

In an article published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1849¹ Claudet asks some still-fundamental questions about photography that he feels are still unanswered. Asking questions out loud (so to speak) doesn't happen that often in scientific and tech publications like this, and when they do, it is worth taking a moment to notice them.

Claudet asks and answers the following important questions:

• "Although the Daguerreotype process has during the last ten years been investigated by a great number of philosophers, and brought to a considerable degree of perfection by a still greater number of practitioners, it may appear surprising that the principal phaenomena upon which this new art is founded, are still enveloped in a mysterious darkness.

1. What is the action of light on the sensitive coating?
   2. How does the mercurial vapour produce the Daguerreotype image?
   3. Which are the particular rays of light that impart to the chemical surface the affinity for mercury?
   4. What is the cause of the difference in achromatic lenses between the visual and photogenic foci? why do they constantly vary?
   5. What are the means of measuring the photogenic rays, and of finding the true focus at which they produce the image?

People in the NYC Skyline (1937)

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There are many photographic souvenir publications for New York City, but there are very few that are so interested in including people in their many city landscape images as Illustrated Souvenir of New York (1937). It is attractively bound--or at least it has a more complicated binding than most of these publications--which was something that attracted my attention. In any event, it turns out that there are quite a few unusually-social images for a publication meant to concentrate on tourists' high points of a visit to NYC, a few of which I'm including below.

One of my favorites from the series is a montage of people in the Manhattan skyline--this seems a little unusual for the period, though I've encountered this sort of image before (a few examples of which you can find on this blog by searching people/skyline). The title for the image is a little odd --"blood and steel, ambition, brains and glamour New York"--and has a bit of a train-wreck flavoring, along with a taste of Prussia (as in the "Blut und Eisen"/"Blood and Steel" speech of von Bismarck in 1862):

[Detail]

High Above Brooklyn, Looking at Manhattan (1938)

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As much as I like the history of the film industry in NYC in the early days (and then of television in the 1940s and 1950s) this post will not address that--I'm simply interested here in the cover art of NYC on this 1938 pamphlet about Eastern Service Studios. The place has a long and fine history--built by Paramount in 1920, it is still in service today as Kaufman Studios, in Long Island City...there's plenty on the place online, detailing the history of production there from the first two Marx Brothers  movies through Law & Order.  But as I said, it is the cover that really interest me, as they're almost an artwork on their own. The pamphlet is huge, 15x10", making the photograph of the city front and back about 20" long--it is a large piece.

What we see is a view of New York City from about the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Brooklyn Heights,  at bottom and just north of Green-Wood and west of Prospect Park/Grand Army Plaza; in the East River we see the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg Bridges, and as we move a little to the west, we see all of Manhattan, all the way up to east Harlem and Randall's Island, and then some. It is a marvelous photo. Unfortunately, the covers of the pamphlet are big/thick cardboard, making them very crumbly, and so the chips and missing pieces. Still, it is an aggressively interesting work.  

 

The images in detail:

And the stages at the studio:

 

 

Delight is Where You Find It: Wagon Axle Catalog for 1905

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The short story here is that less friction makes for happier conveyance and easier hauling. And evidently the founder of the Timken Roller Bearing Axle Company, Henry Timken, figured that out in the early 1890's¹, rolling his engineering insights and acumen and successful experimentation and founding his eponymous company in 1899 (and which exists as an international entity today). There's great beauty in a fine idea, and in well-engineered parts and machinery, and no doubt the Timken axle is one of these--but what drew my attention to this catalog were the wagons and carts that benefited from the engineering. There is a superior sense of place in some of these images, an unexpected and quiet beauty found in the pages of a manufacturer's catalog:

[Image source: Timken Roller Bearing Axle Company, Catalogue No. 5, published in Canton, Ohio, ca. 1902 (not later than January 1905).  7x9.5",  unpaginated though 42pp long, including 9 plates of photos (some of which are above), plus 3 plates of drawings. Printed wrappers.  Provenance: Library of Congress, with their surplus stamp on the back. There are no copies of this title located in WorldCat/OCLC; there is another version, entitled "Carriage and wagon axle department, Timken Roller Bearing Axle Co., manufacturers of Timken roller bearing axles for all kinds of carriages and wagons ..." ca. 1908, that is located in two locations: the Hagley Museum, and the Henry Ford Museum. I can find no other library of museum holdings.]

 

On the Job in 1874

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This post really doesn't have anything to do with anything--it is just an interesting image of a newly constructed building capturing a sense of  its solemn activity ornamented in heaviness, intersected by one guy (perhaps a watchman) who is standing there at the intersection of Nothing & Everything.  [Source: New York Sketchbook of Architecture, James Osgood, NY, 1874.]

Found Art in Tin, ca. 1865

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I found this tiny photograph (nearly coverable by a U.S. quarter) quite some time ago, part of a collection of titles that I thought I would turn into an imaginary 19th century mug book, complete with biographies and crime chronologies. It hasn't happened yet, though I do enjoy looking closely at this images, and their housing.  This photo is a tintype--a process invented in the early 1850's beginning life called melainotype and then ferrotype before coming to be called tintype--which I think was made in 1865-1875, and has a home-made mat that measures 2.5 x 4" and with the photographic image 1 x 3/4". While the image of the woman with her hat is interesting in itself, there is a certain distraction of interest in the mat, with its slightly uneven opening cuts and the remnants of the penciled guidelines.  The photo is held in place against the mat by two pieces of advertisements--and truth be told I like that nearly as much as the photo on the other side.  The Mona Lisa is what it is, of course, but the back of the Mona Lisa's frame and backing is fascinating in itself. 

 

 

 

 

 

Women in the Sub-Kingdom of Pants (1918)

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 This is a photo of a tiny piece of the army behind the army--in this case women preparing clothing for the British Expeditionary Force in 1918.  The trousers that they are handling in this image represent--in an offhand calculation--about one one hundred thousandth of one percent of the trousers that just the BEF would have worn. .00001, or some such number. When the photograph was made in late 1918, the U.K. had about four million men in uniform, which was not the total of all those who served; in the end, nearly 2.6 million U.K. soldiers were killed or wounded from 1914-1918. It took millions of people in a vast coordinated effort to support a n army of this size, and so far away. 

Source:  part of the 500+ image collection of news photo service photographs, many of which would have the paper description attached to the image for inclusion as a caption to the image when it was published in a magazine or newspaper.

Source:  part of the 500+ image collection of news photo service photographs, many of which would have the paper description attached to the image for inclusion as a caption to the image when it was published in a magazine or newspaper.

Nabokov in Black & White

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The odd thing about seeing Vladimir Nabokov in black & white is that he had such an enormous relationship with color, though perhaps the man had the capacity to add color where it wasn't and then interpret the missing colors as they should or could before passing them on through his synesthesia machine. In any event, I just wanted to post this picture and share--this is an original of some sort (large, at 11x14") and though I must say I don't know all that much about him this image seems to be an uncommon one...or at least I don't recall seeing it before:

I can't make out what page the 2nd Webster's is open to, but it really doesn't matter.  It is interesting to see his collection of Lolita in the background: 

 

In any event, here's a bit from Speak, Memory, in which Nabokov describes aspects of his synesthesia with color and sound (the quote found originally on the Fury Factory blog, here: https://furyfactory.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/nabokov/):

“…I present a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps “hearing” is not quite accurate, since the color sensations seem to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror ofo take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and hucklberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and dipthongs do not have special colors unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh, a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation).

Ghost Vision and the Coming of T.V.

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Joseph Plateau, "On a New and Curious Application of the Permanence of Impressions on the Retina", in Philosophical Magazine, volume 36, January-June 1850, pp 434-436; followed immediately in a much longer paper, "Second Paper on a New and Curious Application of the Permanence of Impressions on the Retina", pp 436-452, with two plates.

From: An Annotated Bibliography of Flicker Fusion Phenomena...1740-1952, by Carney Landis, p. 

Plateaun (1801-1883) was the inventor of the Phenakistoscope in 1829, and contributed often (especially with considerable papers in 1835 and 1836) on the issue of persistence of vision. Here he writes of that and the flicker effect, which is the optical illusion in which individual sequential units of images are viewed as a continuous motion of images, which is a trick of the visual system and makes such this as the movies and cartoons and animated shows possible.  It is a terrible irony that this great writer on physiological optics would be blind or nearly so by the 1840's, this a result of an experiment conducted requiring him to stare at the sun for nearly half a minute.

"Plateau studied in great detail the phenomena of accidental colors and irradiation, both of which he considered as arising from a similar cause related to the persistence of the image on the retina. Accidental colors are those that appear after staring for some time at a colored object and then at a black surface, or closing one’s eyes and pressing one’s hands over them. An image of the object appears, usually in complementary color and slightly diminished in size. Plateau’s results include his discovery that accidental colors combine both with each other and with real colors according to the usual laws of color mixture. In irradiation luminous objects on a dark background appear enlarged, a factor clearly of interest to astronomers, among whom the question of the extent of the enlargement was causing controversy. Plateau showed that enlargement occurs regardless of the distance from the object and—explaining the varied experiences of the controversialists—that the mean amount of enlargement from the same source varied considerably from one individual to another."--Dictionary of Scientific Biography

Also in this volume: J. Locke, "On the Phatascope", pp 453-457, "instrument for giving single vision with two eyes" (--Living pictures; their history, photoproduction and practical working. With a digest of British patents and annotated bibliography, Henry Hopwood, 1899.)

Among the many other articles in this volume is William Fishburn Donkin's "On the Geometrical Interpretation of Quaternions", pp 489-502. (See Alexander MacFarlane's Bibliography of Quaternions..., 1904, full text here: http://ow.ly/kFRy304gfVD

Notes:

• See The History of Discovery of Cinematography timeline, which is especially interesting for the pre-1850 entries http://precinemahistory.net/1850.htm

 

A Unique Bird's Eye Panorama of Washington, D.C., ca. 1914

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Original Panorama-Style Montage View of Washington, D.C., ca. 1914.  These images were taken from the Washington Monument, and perform nearly a 360-degree perspective of the city.  The major and obvious clue for the date of these photos is the Lincoln Memorial--rather, where the Lincoln Memorial would be.  Photo #2 shows the beginning of construction, which began in 1914 and which would take until 1922 to complete.  Each is 80x135mm, or 80x1145 mm all together, or 3.25" x 38.5" (actually, about 30" long once overlap is considered).

Detail from photo #5:

 

And a detail of photo #2, showing the site of the Lincoln Memorial:

The History of Obviousness, Part 455(b): Guard Post in a Tree

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The part about The History of Obviousness that is so wonderful is that sometimes the obviousnesses aren't evident, or apparent, until they are established--and then of course there is no ghostly memory of their formative semi-hidden natures. Sometimes things are best hidden in plain sight, and sometimes one doesn't realize that is is raining men-in-bowler-hats until Rene Magritte points it out.  This may be one of those cases where something is so obvious that its extreme nature just blends into the surroundings, even when there aren't any.

[Source: Illustrirte Zeitung, December 31, 1914.]

So, in the picture above, we have not only a guard/observation station built in a lonely tree, but there's also a small lean-to at the bottom, with of course a soldier standing next to (but not inside)  it.