JF Ptak Science Books

The Belgian Collector of Life (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is an excellent example of appreciating images in context.  The photograph seemed line an ordinary image of a soldier peering through a periscope on action ahead of his trench, in some miserable battlefield, somewhere in Europe, 1918.  The image is the product of a photographic pool, the photographers working in semi-unison to produce acceptable images to be used in publications illustrating the war.  The images could not be too terribly graphic, and must not relate any useful military intelligence--they would pass through the hands of very active censors whose job it was to slightly inform the reading public and to also keep morale high, a difficult balancing act.

And so this is what I thought--until I turned the image over--and saw that it was stamped "Photo by Central News Photo Service", and was accompanied by a typed caption (below), the bit of text that was to be the standardized caption for this photograph when and if it was used by a magazine or newspaper.

The title is "The Belgian Collector". 

I was surprised to read that the Belgian collector was a sharpshooter. He would scan the field looking for any unfortunate enough to spend a moment of thoughtless to leave themselves exposed for one brief moment.  In that moment the exposed soldier could/would die, collected. 

In a  sense, "collect" like "John Fowles The Collector, only killing them with a rifle.

But that was his job. And it was war. And if he was on your side, then you'd want him there.  

"The Collector" title was chilling, and poetical.  

 

Christmas Mail, 1917

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is the U.S. Army mail depot at Regents Park, London, braced for and under siege by  Christmastime mail in 1917. It strikes me that there may be a million items in this photo--at this time in the war there were something like 35 million people in the services for all countries dedicated to the war effort, which is approximately half the number that served in total.  If these letters in this picture were bodies, I reckon that there would be five more rooms like this necessary to tell the visual picture of the war dead and wounded.  This aside, I initially focused on the guy in the rear with the white shirt and tie, standing there pretty much overwhelmed by the task of moving all of that stuff...and perhaps with the idea that much of the mound would wind up being undeliverable because the recipient was killed.  I wonder if that mail was returned, or not?

 

Business-end of German Artillery (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

The American soldier in this new service photo is having a good hard look at the business end of a captured German Minenwerfer ("mine launcher", which was a short-range mortar), .a three-inch field gun used to devastating effects throughout the war.  We are told via the supplied typed caption that the display was installed on Coney Island (Brooklyn) as part of a Red Cross fund-raising exhibit.

A Great Panoramic Photo of Battlefield Action, WWI (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I recall, I think, that this was the largest photograph of war printed during World War I, looking to be something on the order of 8 x 16 feet or so.  This photo of the photo was printed by Underwood & Underwood, and stamped "British Official Photograph", and printed at some time in 1918.  It seems that this is an actual battle scene, which was a very uncommon thing among war photographs for the Great War--more so for this group of photographs (News Photo Service)  produced by pool photographers for equal distribution among subscribing newspapers and periodicals. Actual combat photos distributed by the News Photo Service agencies were not a high priority, unless they depicted routed or retreating or being-defeated Germans--it was not a popularly-distributed subject, mainly for propagandist purposes.

I expect that this photo would've given the view a you-are-there effect, as the main characters in the composition were about life-sized--an attempt of slice-of-life experience.  There is a surprising amount of foreground in this picture, though.

 

 

Pigeon Heroes of WWI

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Here's a series of three photographs relating to carrier pigeons in WWI.  The first is a magnificent photograph of a memorial to a carrier pigeon named Auguste, a famous flyer who evidently performed invaluable services time after time, a bird of splendid behavior whose actions no doubt saved the lives of many soldiers, and who was shot down by German troops in commission of an assignment.  Auguste's comrades constructed this makeshift memorial in the trenches for the heroic animal.

And another photograph that told the story of the pigeon in very plain  language:

A Moment of Levity at the Almost-End of WWI (October, 1918)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

In a moment of levity at the end of WWI, these sailors from America, Great Britain, and France got together for a bit, and turned their little doggie mascot into a small attraction of sorts, entertaining themselves and the small curious crowd surrounding them.  The photograph was made anonymously by the Western Newspaper Union and is stamped "British Official Photograph", and published on 10 October 1918, a month before the end of the war which at this point seemed to be not so imminent.

Which is a delightful detail from the full scale image:

Mail Call, War's End, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Yes, this was undoubtedly a posed shot to some degree, but these U.S. soldiers were still very serious about getting their mail. This is a new photo service image made by a pool of photographers whose work was passed by a censor before being distributed¹.  The photo was made in the closing weeks of the War in 1918.  On the back of the photo is stamped:  "What a letter from home means in France/Group of American Red Cross chauffeurs in Paris at mail distribution at their garage", and "Bureau Publicity Lake Div. American Red Cross, for release October 2".

 

 

Books as War Booty, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

In the vast caches of loot taken during the course of war I suspect books have ranked somewhere in the middle of stolen stuff--no doubt some fine libraries have disappeared, though I can't offhand say how many fine libraries emerged from the slaughterhouse.  This photograph--a wartime news photo service image--is one of the few that I have seen depicting the capture of stolen books. 

"Pick Me Up and Pop Me In, I May Kill a Hun One Day" (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

A little went a long way, sometimes, in collecting the ends and bits of a campaign or a retiring column or from the attics and basements of village houses, or in scrapyards or dustbins or abandoned yards and buildings. Scrap has sometimes contributed greatly to major war efforts; and sometimes it has contributed just a few hundred rounds of ammunition, gathered from the sick or dying or forces on the move, that have told the tale of change in battle.  When you can only carry so much in a campaign where shooting can be an endless process, you can by definition never really carry enough ammunition when you're already carrying enough of everything else.

 

WWI Parade of Snow, 1917/1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2775

This news photo service image--stamped "Hearst-Pathe News Agency" on the back--is from the winter of 1917/1918 and shows a patriotic snow parade somewhere in the United States.  The snow looks prodigious, judging from the piles in the foreground and also the accumulated snow on the windowsills, and I imagine that all of the snow floats were sculpted mainly out of exiting snow in the street.  It is a delightful scene, to me, and hosts a variety of smaller, lovely images in vignette. 

 

The man in shadow and sleeping figure (boy) in the buggy complement the white-mustachioed bowler-wearing man to the left; the men looking on in the foreground are interesting, too--plus there's that laundry in the background.  Given that the laundry is out (and wasn't just left out during the storm) and that no one seems to be particularly bundled up against cold, I'm going to guess that there was a break in the weather that pushed the temperature higher than normal, with almost everyone taking advantage of the warm snap, as people do everywhere, all the time.  I also like the tiny American flag on the tall pole at left.

An Episode in the History of Mud: Heavy and Stuck in 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

What is this man smiling about?

[Source: from the store's WWI news service photo collection, 500 strong!]

He's satisfied or at least amused with his place there in the steamroller, rather than his soldier brothers who were trying (impossibly) to leverage the beast out of a shell-made muck hole. The guys on foot appear to  have had a comic sense of what their task was supposed to be. 

Invading England with 50,000 Planes (1908)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2764

Some of the most striking things in my collection/store/accumulation are the hundreds of images that portray data for display purposes--even more so, those that use a vernacular setting to put some anthropomorphic breath into a statistic.

The print that we're looking at here appeared in the 19 December 1908  issue of The Illustrated London News and is entitled "The Futility of Herr Rudolf Martin's¹ Plan of Invasion by Aeroplane", and reports on a possible German invasion scenario of Great Britain that was delivered in Berlin on 2 October 1908. This fantastic piece of  artwork by Hermanus Willem Koekkoek (1867-1929) graphically depicts what the author maintained was the impossibility of a German force to invade England by landing 50,000 flying machines and 100,000 men on the Kentish coast of England--undoable because "of the impossibility of finding landing-room (for the planes) and cover for an army on aeroplanes. The artist depicts a small town and what I guesstimate to be 60 planes in the air and 75 or so on the ground, leaving it to the imagination of the reader where the other 49,875 might go. He DOES make a point, and very vividly. 

"Nothing could show better the futility of Government Councillor Rudolf Martin's idea that Germany could construct 50,000 flying machines for 50-million pounds...and land 100,000 men on the Kentish coast from Calais within half an hour." I would imagine that this illustration drove the point home to the folks who didn't actually bother to read anything about the Martin defense plan. (It was in a similar way that Thomas Nast was able to control public opinion and sway political refuge and protection away from Boss Tweed. Tweed famously boasted that he didn't care what the newspapers said about him because his power base didn't read--he might've been and probably was correct here, so Nast took after Tweed via the political cartoon, and big too, and frequently; and the cartoons, even if the people looking at them couldn't read, told the whole story graphically, and it was this that brought an end to Tweed more than anything else.)

In 1908 Martin gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which he outlined another plan by which he felt Germany could launch 3,500 "specially design" airships (I'm guessing dirigibles) and land 350,000 (!) men in England in a half-hour. This evidently whipped itself into a frothy aeroplanitis in 1909, despite such efforts as this graphical reasoning by the ILN to dispense with the unreasonable fears.

The airplane flown by the Wrights (the first powered heavier-than-air flight) occurred barely six years prior to these frantic events.  Their invention was still fresh (and basically "foreign", as the Brits lagged well behind the other major powers in flight until WWI) and understandable in a way that the fears were not understandable, not really, because of the newness and exotic aspect of the possibly-threatening invention. Also it should be noted that the first heavier-than-air airplane crossing of the Channel didn't take place until the next year, by Louis Bleriot, who claimed a 1000-pound prize for being the first to do so. The first passenger wasn't taken across until 1910, and the first airship didn't make a flight across until 1915. So no doubt Martin was looking into a far off future, except that the planes were still mostly of Wright design. 

• For a tour of the chronological history of the graphical representation of quantitative data as well as innovations in statistical and representational cartography, please have a look at Michael Friendly's fantastic work at York University https://datavis.ca/milestones/index.php?group=1900%2B--it is an historical site the way it should be done, complete with all the trimmings, as well as the usually-absent but very important citations to the original articles used in the chronology. 

Notes:

1. I don't know much about Mr. Martin at all except that in Richard P. Hallion's Taking Flight, Inventing the Aerial Age, from Antiquity to the First.... (pg 298) we find Martin being mentioned among other "popular authors" as Verne, Wells, Kipling, and Fawcett as being somewhat responsible for forming the perception of future flight. Martin was also the president of the German Airship League and author of The Coming War in the Air.

 

The Skies of the "Electrical Experimenter"

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The Electrical Experimenter is my new favorite magazine, and here's why:

In addition to being thick and full of real electrical necessities and scientific bric-a-brac, it also held a fair amount of speculative thinking and just plain old science fiction (when sci fi wasn't "plain" or "old").  The EE was created and edited by the very busily creative Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), a pioneer in science fiction, who held the magazine together from 1913 until 1929 (as the Electrical Experimenter from 1913-1920 and then as Science and Invention from then until the finale in 1931). There was evidently no holding back on cover design--at least from September 1915 until the end, when glorious ideas were display with flat design dominated by unusual and contrasting colors. For example, in the montage above, I was able to find glassy unadorned background skies that were red, yellow, purple, blue, and orange, with variation on each. Not only were the skies unusual, so were the surface colors: unusual blues, deep blacks, n=unnatural greens, purples, and so on. All of this framed some occasionally Highly Unusual and Not Expected Ideas. For example, in these WWI-era images--working right to left on the montage--there was an aerial bombing assistant of a light that illuminated the target through which a bomb could be deployed; a land battleship; an enormous motorcycle-like land megaship; a Martian canal-governing apparatus; a Tesla death weapon; an overland trolley housed in a gigantic spoked wheel; and a relatively tame portrayal of a communication system for a submarine. These are terrifically entertaining, and of course all they are are the covers. So, The Electrical Experimenter: terrific. 

 

 

Revisiting the Vermeer of the Tars

JF Ptak Science Books  Reworking post 842 (from 2008)

In England, women were welcomed to the (paid) workforce during the years of the First World War (1914-1918)—their employment in traditionally male positions enabled those they replaced to go out to the front and die for their country.  Thus the women seen here in the News Photo Service Agency photograph (taken in 1918), working at spraying tar in the streets of London, were appreciated, and tolerated.  For women in England the War blasted away the contrivances of formally scheduled employment:  something like 12% of fall women in England were working as servants and house cleaners.   Come the War, women were offered jobs of revolutionary stature in a wide range and variety of work.  The Civil Service employment for women went from 33,000 in 1911 to 102,000 in 1921, and trade union membership rose 160% (357,000 in 1914 to 1,000,000 in 1918 (with men showing a 44% increase at the same time); for the most part, though, employers took advantage of the situation, and the women still generally earned less than half of the salary as comparable male workers did (or the men they replaced). 

Thayer's "New Navigable War Balloon" and Mutually Assured Destruction, (1885)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Here's a rather Jules Verne-y concept for a military balloon, presented to by General Russell Thayer, and published in the Scientific American Supplement in 1885.  In this iteration the aircraft is labeled a "war-balloon" but looks benign and observational; in the second image, see a month later in Harper's Weekly, the balloon is definitely a war machine, having just bombed something with what looks like an enormous explosive. The scene here illustrates an airship in flight over a very industrialized section of a city, perhaps to drive home a propaganda point that bombing was accurate enough to be strategic and also that targets were industries and not general populations. 

(The first aerial bombing seems to have been during the first Italian War of Independence and used by the Austrians from a  balloon against Venice in 1849; while this 1916 bombing occurred a few years after the first bomb was dropped from a heavier-than-air aircraft during the Italo-Turkish War on 1 November 1911, the Italians this time delivering the blow in Tripoli.)  

The idea of aerial bombardment was an enormous threat, imagining death coming from above,  huge airships dropping untold numbers of bombs upon a city--I imagine that the idea came as much a blow to someone at the end of the 19th c as the threat of nuclear devastation came to those in the mid-20th c.  As a matter of fact S.L. Koter and J.E. Gessler quote an unnamed "distinguished officer in the U.S. Navy" implying much the same thinking as would be later heard as nuclear-weapons-inspired Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD): "War will become impossible because it will signify not merely great loss of life and property, but annihilation". (Ballooning, a History; 1782-1900, p. 268.)

It is particularly interesting to note here that Thayer, proposes to use a propulsion system that is not dependent on a propeller but rather "compressed air".  “In the independent balloon the motor is a high pressure air compressor coupled directly to a newly devised carbonic acid gas engine and a reservoir for storing the air until sufficient pressure is obtained. The construction of the dependent balloon is similar to that of the independent ship except as regards the motive power which is here electricity...”