JF Ptak Science Books

An Alphabet of Australian Convict Mugshots, 1900-1920

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1797

These photographs are remarkable capsules of space and time--they hold the mostly-realized fates of their subjects, taken into custody in Sydney for crimes from prostitution to stealing to loitering to bigamy to murder and around and around. The poses are interesting in that there seems to be no unified way of making them, which means that most often the detained person had the opportunity to adopt whatever posed they pleased, given the emotional constraints of their situation.  Some are defiant, some at complete ease in front of the camera; others are completely distracted and scared, and embarrassed and guilty.  There also doesn't seem to be a segregated point for making the photographs, tough there is a common-looking wall and hallway for some of them.  It would be interested to know if the Sydney police were making an editorial statement by placing their subjects in unflattering locations, like standing near a dripping faucet, or amidst trash, or in a garden, or in front of toilets.  In any event the range of emotions is remarkable, even for looking through only a few hundred of the more than 100,000 images that are on line here and there from the good folks in Sydney.     [The images below all started out their life at Sydney Justice and Police, and then used in parts by the following websites and blogs from which I harvested my selection below,:  Retronaut , the Independent,,  Live Journal   the Daily Mail, and the Historic Houses Front (which also has full-ish records for each photograph).  An interesting interpretation of many of the images can be found at SCAN.

Analytically  interesting, an interpretative invitation.  Apprehensive? 

 

 Bored

The Stages of Human Life--Illustrated

JF PTtak Science Books      Post 1796    [Part of the History of the Future series.]

I came across this fantastic representation of the stages of human life in the beautifully-named book by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, All the Properytees of Thyings, which was published in Westminster in 1495 (and also known as De proprietatibus rerum, also translated as On the nature of things, or On the properties of things), and which was originally written around 1225).  The book was a bestiary, a marvelous encyclopedia, a collection of all things as known in the 13th century--it would be interesting to represent all that is know today and compact it into a workable, logical, usable (printed !) book of a thousand pages.  One of those many images was this:

 a simple, compact reminder to the book's readers about the progression of life.  Infant, toddler (in a Renaissance walker), child (at games), teen (adopting some of the trappings of adulthood), prime-of-life, middle aged and then the leaning elder. 

It strikes me that the idea of "stages" is what most of what experience might be--the ideas of "stages" and "progression" are everywhere, even perhaps in the places they shouldn't be.  There are simple things like rockets that keep releasing smaller and smaller stages of itself until it gets down to the (satellite etc.) nub; sleep has its five stages resulting in the final resting state of r.e.m.,; there are recognized stages of  development for psychology (Erikson), and cognition (Piaget) and need (Maslkow) and  moral (Kohlberg), and spiritual (Fowler), and  economic (lots) and on and on into the progressive stages of the sunset. Progression and series belong in arithmetic and geometry (and etc.) and in the scientific method, as well as music (succession of chords) and disease (more so than health).  Examples are limitless.  But for right now, I just wanted to post a few images of these antique reminders of progression and mortality...

The Stages of Life, broadside published by James Catnach, London c. 1830. British Museum.

The Moon Made of Brick, 1869

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1795

In 1869 Edward Everett Hale (author of "A Man WIthout a Country" in 1863 and also one of the earliest pieces of fiction regarding alternative worlds in"Hands Off" in 1883) wrote a piece of speculative fiction called "The Brick Moon", a story told int he form of a journal of Capt. Frank Ingham, relating the story of the launching of a satellite that was to be an aid to navigation.  The construction was fantastic--a sphere made of concentric rings of brick enclosed by an outer layer of brick, reaching 200 feet in diameter, to be hurled into space by two gigantic flywheels on a polar orbit 4,000 miles high, providing a new bright shining star as a means of determining longitude.

"Any section through any diameter looked like an immense rose-window, of six circles grouped round a seventh. In truth, each of these sections would reveal the existence of seven chambers in the moon,—each a sphere itself,—whose arches gave solidity to the whole; while yet, of the whole moon, the greater part was air. In all there were thirteen of these moonlets, if I am so to call them; though no one section, of course, would reveal so many. Sustained on each side by their groined arches, the surface of the whole moon was built over them and under them,—simply two domes connected at the bases. The chambers themselves were made lighter by leaving large, round windows or open circles in the parts of their vaults farthest from their points of contact, so that each of them looked not unlike the outer sphere of a Japanese ivory nest of concentric balls. You see the object was to make a moon, which, when left to its own gravity, should be fitly supported or braced within. Dear George was sure that, by this constant repetition of arches, we should with the least weight unite the greatest strength. I believe it still, and experience has proved that there is strength enough."   [Full story here.]

[Image source: here, from the Encyclopedia of Science website.]

Getting the enormous and fantastically heavy "moon" not only off the ground but into space would be an enormous and fantastic mystery--solved here by Hale by the thing being "left to its own gravity" and the two giant flywheels. 

It was in this story, published in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly, that the idea of the artificial satellite was introduced.  Actually, it was also more than that, because a foul-up caused an early launch of the sphere, launching it into orbit with people on board, making it the first space station.  And it was certainy the first collection of space bricks. Of course this took an enormous leap of imagination and insight, and Hale's effort must be applauded as a visionary work.

 

 

Architecture, "Biotechnique", and a Peek into the Future of the Computer, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1794

Frederick Kiesler (Director of the Laboratory of Design-Correlation, Columbia (University)  School of Architecture) has been called one of America's most influential non-building architects of the 20th century for his influence on a generation of modern thinkers and builders.  In a rare pamphlet--an offprint, actually-- called "Architecture as Biotechnique", which was a separate printing of an article Kiesler wrote for the Architectural  Record in 1939  (and printed in 1940, and appearing under the interior title of "Design Trends"), there is a very enticing peep into the future.  Kiesler was looking at ways of making his architecture more "organic", more in touch with the people who would live inside the building, a radical thinker on the design of living space,  and wrote about these ideas in a longer piece called Endless House in which he explained his "design-correlations" in 1937.  [The original i salso available for purchase via our blog bookstore, here.]

[The cover of the Architectural Record article, which I find to be, well, highly unusual.]

His descriptions of his work escape me some, making me feel as though I've started the article in the middle, when in fact I'm just starting--mainly because of some unfamiliar usages of common words that have been redesigned by the author to mean something else or more...plus the deeply theoretically architectural stuff.  But the article starts with his study of the genetics of architecture and building design, and finishes with eight pages or so on the design for a differently-functioning piece of everyday house interaction--the bookshelves of a library.

It is in the section on the library that Kiesler includes a "Metabolism-Chart of Mobile-Home-Library" (and by this he's talking about a movable library within the home and not a library for a mobile home), the bottom part of which shows the evolution of the way in which information is presented in the library.  The "cultural nucleus" or the way in which the data is presented and the way the presented obecjt is stored, and starts with the scroll in 2000 BC (with pigeon-hole storing), then the bound volume  (stored on shelves, 1445 AD), then the the microfilm (stored by "filing", in 1937-1950 AD), all of which are leading up to "opto-phonetics", stored in photo-cell-unit(s), in 2000 AD.  The evolutionary part in all of this is the increase in concentration/direction, an ease in visual and manual efforts, as well as easing "torsal" ("bending, leaning, rising, turning") and "pedal" efforts (walking, moving, standing), making the acquisition and control of the data in the library over time.

Now Kieser doesn't actually decribe (here, anyway) what he means by photocell-driven opto-electronic information device, but in 1939/40, when this piece was written,, most of what this machien might be was left to the creative imagination--but the fact that Kiesler has come to this at all with the year 2000 as a probable time for its arrival is fairly remarkable. 

It is also interesting to see Kiesler's forensic analysis of the range of human motion regarding the selection of books from shelves (and using a Vesalius image for his 5'6" person):

Notes:

"The term "biotechnique" appeared first in my treaties on "Town Planning" as "Vitalbau", in De Stijl, No. 10/11, Paris 1925 and in America first in Hound and Horn, May 1934."--Kiesler, from his introduction.

"Introjection and Projection, Frederick Kiesler and his Dream Machine", an interesting read,  by Stephen Phillips, in Architecture and Surrealism, by Thomas Mical.

 

Outline for Disucssing the Atomic Bomb--I.I. Rabi, November 1945

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1793   Part of a series on development, use and control of atomic and nuclear weapons

[My apologies for the spacing below--Typepad has refused to allow paragraphs today for some reason.]

"As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness."--I.I. Rabi  In Kermit Lansner, Second-Rate Brains: A Factual, Perceptive Report by Top Scientists, Educators, Journalists, and Their Urgent Recommendations (1958).

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1944 was awarded to Isidor Isaac Rabi "for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei".--NobelPrize .org

"Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way into you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds."
[Witnessing the first atomic bomb test explosion.] — Isidor Isaac Rabi  Science: the Center of Culture (1970).

"To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics." 1970

I came across this interesting sheet of paper in my files, a neglected part of a larger archive  of background and draft papers and proposals by the Vannevar Bush group working on the question of the control of atomic weapons and the formalization of the American position regarding the use and control of atomic weapons (and dated from October 1945 to February 1946).   (Other contributors to this archive include President Harry Truman, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Dr. Vannevar Bush, (future AEC director) Carroll Wilson, Alger Hiss, I.I. Rabi, William Shockley, Frederick Dunn, Joseph E. Johnson, Leo Pasvolsky, Philip Morrison, Col. Nichols, William McRae, Admiral W.H.P. Blandy, George L. Harrison, and others).  The archive (which I've written about elsewhere on this blog) are remarkable for their foresight and logic, and addressed the implications and future of the atomic bomb at the earliest stages of its existence.

Rabi was a great physicist (being awarded the Nobel for physics in 1944) who was of course deeply involved in the technical/scientific end of fighting World War II.  It was his conviction that his brain was best used  in the development of radar and could not be convinced to spend all of his efforts in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, feeling that the further development of radar was more important and more immediately applicable to the winning of the war than the longer-range prospects and use of the atomic bomb.  He worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory working on radar for the duration--except (and this was a great exception) for being a frequent consultant and visitor to bomb works in the desert. (Access to Los Alamos during this time was extremely tight--there were very few other people among the many thousands who worked there who were able to simply "visit" the facilities as their expertise was needed.)

And so at the end of the war, Rabi became part of the Bush group that was given the task of trying to figure out what to do about the bomb--its control, its possible use, its proliferation, and so on). At some point, months into this process, it looks as though Rabi created a single-page outline of discussion points on atomic bomb issues.  It is very succinct and crisp, with nothing more than the bare essentials. This is a carbon copy of the original, and evidently was meant for Irving Langmuir.

The Dots that Connected the Lines, 1869

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1791   [Part of the History of Dots series.]

Def. 1.1. A point is that which has no part.
Def. 1.2. A line is a breadthless length.
Def. 1.3. The extremities of lines are points

--Euclid, The Elements 

Please see the associated post on  the History of the West and the History of Lines: Telegraphs, Railraods, Treaties, and Barbed Wire.

I really don't mean to tangle this post up in what might be one of the most profoundly significant books ever written, mainly because the I'm talking about "dots" and not "points", though several points do come into play in the story.

The dots come into the story with the finishing of the great Overland Route, the Transcontinental Railroad, which was built between 1863¹ and 1869, and which via massive construction tied together various lines to make the fist continuous connections by rail between the American Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The construction for the vast missing connecting chunks were undertaken by the Central Pacific Railroad of California and the Union Pacific Railroad, building (respectively) their ends extending from Oakland (CA) to Council Bluffs (IA).  (A map of the railroad line can be seen below in a clickable whole and then again in the "continued reading" part of the post in more detailed sections. Interestingly this map shows both a plan and profile of the line, and when you take a closer look at the bottom part of the map it is easy then to see why the Central Pacific had so many delays getting through the Sierra Nevada.)

The building of the railroad line was notoriously difficult, undertaken by companies desperate to build their ends fast and not using the best materials or doing the best work (with millions needing to be spent on repair of the Central Pacific effort as soon as the line was completed), or treating the largely immigrant workforce (mainly Chinese and Irish) fairly. But the job did get done and it got done relatively quickly, considering too that the first primitive locomotives didn't appear in the U.S. until 1831--it didn't take long at all to produce thousands of mile of line as well as the sophisticated machinery to run on them.  The great engineer Oliver Evans waged a little war on the future by allowing himself to see the following:

"The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another, almost as fast as birds can fly, 15 or 20 miles an hour.... A carriage will start from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup in New York the same day.... Engines will drive boats 10 or 12 miles an hour, and there will be hundreds of steamers running on the Mississippi, as predicted years ago." --Oliver Evans, 1800 [Evans built the first stationary steam engine in 1800, and then in 1804 built the first steam engine powered boat.]

 He wasn't talking about railroads per se, as the steam locomotive hadn't been invented yet.  But 30 years later or so there was the first appearance of these machines, and then another thirty years after that they were running across the United States, which was a remarkable turnaround in the economy of transportation. 

The very end of this story though is told in dots.  When the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific met in the lonely Promontory Summit, Utah, there was an on-site celebration where the two lines were famously tied together using a golden spike. (Actually there were two gold, one silver one blended gold/silver, and one plain spike used int he ceremony.)  The news of the event was carried out to the rest of the country via another new and remarkable medium, the transcontinental telegraph, which had been completed in October 1861 and which allowed nearly simultaneous communication between the two American coasts, with this innovation also taking place about 25 years after the general invention of the telegraph.) 

It is interesting to note that it was during the Lincoln administration--in the earliest part of Lincoln's presidency--that these two great unifying elements were established.  The railroad was started in the first year of the Civil War, and the telegraph finished just months into the conflict.  It is ironic that the first communication going west-to-east by Stephen J. Field (on 24 October 1861) to President Lincoln spoke of the medium's great power in uniting the country, if only East and West:  "will be the means of strengthening the attachment which binds both the East and the West to the Union".  Which may or may not have been true--communications wouldn't necessarily unite, as the country was already deeply at war with itself North and South, and there were already ample telegraphs enough existing between the two that did not manage to keep the country firmly within itself.

Back to Promontory--the proceedings of the celebration were "broadcast" by telegraph, the event being very heavily listened-to news.  There were speeches of course and then toward the end there was a sermon followed by a long entreaty to the almighty.  That finished, the Central Pacific top man, Leland Stanford, was to drive home the final golden spike uniting the lines.  When the spike was driven and finished, the news would be related by the telegraph as so:

"Dot. Dot. Dot."

Three dots would signal the end of the work, and the completion of the railroad.  Stanford reportedly missed on his first swing with his silver hammer, but the news was sent out anyway, saying the work was done.  The signifier relating the connection of thousands of miles of railway track being three simple dots.

Hart stereoview #355, detail, "The Last Rail - The Invocation. Fixing the Wire, May 10, 1869."
Courtesy National Park Service. [Source for image, here.]

Notes:

1.  Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862 which set the stage for the building of the Transcontinental.

Finding a Fat, Bald, Fencing Cake-Eater for Movie Roles, 1923

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1790

I stumbled into an unintentionally iconic time capsule, a collapsible bit in the brevity and complexity department, that sifted out the "extraneous" artistic matter of early motion picture entertainment and got straightaway to the crux of the film-making biscuit, which was finding people to fill the roles in a film.  It sounds simple enough in a simpler time, but it wasn't simple for them--and the residue of the difference between the two is interesting.

In looking through some early documents on sound-on-film motion pictures (that's simultaneous sound-on-film) I came across this nostalgic wonderful insight:  The Standard for March 1923. The Standard Casting Directors Directory was a film exec's handbook, an advertising vehicle for actors and their favored parts, a picture directory of offerings of all scales of applied talent.  In addition to the lovely photos are the descriptions of what their casting specifications might be--including the titles of the specialties.

For "supporting cast/specialty people" for men, the titles include (with actors' names appearing underneath): acrobats, bald headed men, bankers, bearded men (old), bellhops, bit men, boxers, butlers. character men, chauffeurs, Chinamen, Colored Members of the Profession, comedians, cowboys, dancers, detectives, divers, doctors, Englishmen, entertainments, Europeans, evening clothes men (old) , fat men, female impersonators, fencers, footmen, Frenchmen, German types, Hawaiians, Hindus, hunchback, Indians, Irishmen (old), Italians, Japanese, Jewish (old), jockies, judges, juveniles, Mexican, monks, policemen, priests, Russian types, sheriffs, slickers--cake eaters, small town men, Spanish, stunt men, swimmers, tall men (over 6 feet), twins, underworld types, waiters,  and well dressed men". 

I haven't looked to see if there are any cross referenced for, say, bald-headed fencing cake eater footmen.

There were 50 categories for the women (compared to 56 for the men), and included quite a lot of overlap, particularly in the stereotyping department. The more-or-less exclusive categories for women included cooks, dancers, flappers, ingenues, maids, matrons, models, mothers, nuns, nurses, old maids,
stenographers, waitresses, witch types and tall old women. I doubt that there was very much money to be made playing a tall old woman (or a fat/matronly/old maid/tall old woman) but evidently it was more than could be made by playing a woman lawyer/doctor/insert other professional position here _________ .

I realize that this was a simple and useful way of getting things done, of finding the necessary actors for movie roles, but taken slightly out-of-context this pamphlet becomes a little more than that--a small, swallowable capsule of what "normalcy" might have looked like for entertainment folks in a relatively mature medium in 1923. 

Zodiacal-Sexual-Social Indicator: Astrological Prediction Tool, 1919

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

As these things go, this mechanical device is awfully pretty in an Outsider-y kind of way, and I have no doubt that I'd want to own one if for nothing else than for its explicit implied-complexity (whatever that is).  [Source: US Patent and Trademark Office.]

 

Unusual Antiquarian Perspective--Directly Above and Oblique. J.J. Grandville, 1844

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This is the fourth installment in as many days (starting here) on the artwork of the great proto-Surrealist, J.J. Grandville.  Today's quick post (again from his Un Autre Monde, 1844) isn't so much fantastical as the other work pictured here, but it is subtly unusual.  It is my experience in looking at prints and other artwork for the last 30 years or so that antiquarian images looking straight and directly down froma  height are very unusual--so too for the next thing closest to it, looking down from a slightly oblique angle.  Grandville does this often in his work, and I think gives another insight into a brain that was just seeing (most) things differently.  [Here's a link for some posts on looking straight down, here and here, for example.]

 

Proto-Surrealist Flying Machines

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1790

In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy faire Eve; Heav'n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowlie wise:
Think onely what concernes thee and thy being;
Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there [ 175 ]
Live, in what state, condition or degree,
Contented that thus farr hath been reveal'd
Not of Earth onely but of highest Heav'n.

           --J Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 8 (The Argument), line 175 ff

This is another in a series of posts (starting here with an introduction) on the great J.J. Grandville, a visionary artist of high imagination with good strong claims to being an 1840's proto-Surealist.  This small collection of flying machines appears in his Un Autre Monde, published 1844. 

The Artist Having the Last Word...and from a Height

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I've been writing and thinking about J.J. Grandville (see the opening post in this series here  on his proto-Surrealist work) and then took another look at the ending illustration (the last of over 200) of the great proto-Surrealist's Un Autre Monde (1844).  Initially I thought that the word was "Ici" ("Here"), meaning that the end had been reached, Here, and that the arts (represented by the writing instruments)  were giving thanks for a job well done and completed.  On closer inspection, there's more to it than I thought. (This may be already very well-trod ground, but its new to me--my apologies if this is elementary to any art history folks.)

The word isn't "Ici"--its not even a word.  The letters are the initials of the pseudonymous Grandville, whose true name was Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, and so wrote the "I" "I" as columns with the "G"erard as the central bit.  And perhaps the little fellow at the top is a pencil, which would have been the tool of choice for Grandville--and so Grandville, the artist, would be on top of the "G": of his name celebrating his achievement above the other implements of book production (the quill, followed by the pen, the wax stamp (?) and a pocket knife/cutting tool), the artist standing tall above them all.   Or perhaps not. 

Steampunk Orchestra: J.J. Grandville's Proto-Surreal Images, 1844

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1789

I suspect that J.J. Grandville must be remembered as the proto-father of the proto-Surrealists, and probably more.  He was a very prolific illustrator during his short life (1803-1847), producing many images across a very wide field of imagination that would probably be referred to as speculative fiction.  Early in his stunted career he had some considerable influence as a satirical punisher in a number of superior-level magazines before a censorship law prohibiting such social observations criminalized that sort of imagination, and so Grandville moved on to illustrating some great classics in literature. 

In 1844 Grandville (a pseudonym for Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard) published his (literally) fabulous Un Autre Monde, a very creative work of transformation and visionary exploration, which was a parody and critique of the worlds of the present and the possible. Its sharp edge ha been lost to time as much as most any satire or caricature of a dusty political past might be (like farming jokes and James Buchanan in 1861), but when you look at the hundreds of illustrations for this work (as well as its underlying ideas) that is really all you need.  The images speak for themselves, and can speak to most anything, in any language.  This is one of the place where Grandville has writ his name large in the pre-history of Surrealism, an Andre Breton/Ernst Mach approach to lit and art about 70 years early.

The images are simply fantastic.  And you might be ready to see them--with modern eyes--when you read the subtitle head for his book, which reads so:  Un Autre Monde/Transformations, Visions, Incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, explorations, peregrinations, excursions, stations [I'm not sure what this translate to], cosmogonies, fantasmagories, reveries, folatreries ["follies"], lubies ["fads"], metamorphoses, zoomorphie, lithomorphoses, metempsycoes, apotheos, et autre choses... By the end of the title, the reader would suspect that something was "coming".

And so I'm going to post a number of different bits on the images from Un Autre Monde--the first gathering some views of musicians and instruments which take on a definite steampunk variety. Next we'll have a look an interesting use of perspective as Grandville looks almost straight down on his subject--but not quite so, which to me is quite surprising; then there will be posts on weather morphologies, metallic pyramidal flowers, meta-artists, and of course flying machines. 

Numerous Grandville images may be found at Visipix; a full set of Un Autre Monde's illustrations at Flickr, and a full copy of the book at the Internet Archive.

 

The Ship of Fools, In Praise of Folly, and Intelligent Dischord: Brant, Erasmus, and Geiler, 1497-1515

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1788
Johann Geiler von Kayserberg’s Navicula Penitentie (Augsurg, printed by Johann Ottmar, and printed in 1511) is a remarkable book in many ways, but what I’m concerned with here is the fantastic woodcut illustrating the title page.  The book itself is a collection of penitential sermons against moral corruption in his Strassburg community—the sermons won him wide respect and some considerable fame as an orator, writer and theologian—but it is the woodcut of the ship (I’m sorry to reveal) that distracts me more.  It is evidently the earliest depiction of a fully-rigged and outfitted ship, with great and accurate detail, far beyond what had been published in the previous 50 or so years of movable type printing.  Presumably what we are seeing is Geiler preaching to ship full of what seem to be clerical/clergy folks rather than sailor—clearly Geiler is approaching the upper class here in the ship and not the working man. 

I think that Geiler had Sebastian Brant’s 1494 Ship of Fools in mind when the great Hans Burgkmair (the “H.B” who signed this work of art) produced this seafaring image for him.  Also Geiler’s publication date of 1511 is shared with Erasmus’ fantastically influential (and leading-to-the-Protestant-Reformation) book The Praise of Folly. (It was written very quickly, in about a week, and centered around conversations he had with his good friend Sir Thomas More; the Latin title of the book is a bit of a wink and a nod to More, Moriae Encomium.)  The Fool, the Feast of the Fool, the Feast of the Beasts and so on were all very old institutions that allowed and tolerated the caricature and criticism of church and power structure officials—and this at a time in the Middle ages and Renaissance when such free speech by non-Fool types was strictly unacceptable.

In the same work by Brant (“Of Useless Books”, thankfully found with all 117 of the images from the work at the University of Houston library  ) we find the following image of the sage Fool.shorn of his headdress, sitting in the library, wearing glasses, and reading, surrounded by disheveled books that were clearly being used and consumed by the supposed clown. To me it shows the substantiation of the wisdom of the free-thought folly speech of the Fool, who, although clothed ridiculously, was a thoughtful, careful, well-read individual whose message much resembled the messenger. 

The images in Brant's book are so singular and many of the titles so captivating I've included many from the list from Houston's table of contents, below: 

 

Of Useless Books the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Of Beggars Albrecht Dürer
Of Good Counselors the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Of Bad Women Albrecht Dürer
Of Greed the Gnad-Her-Meister
Power of Fatuity Artist unknown
Of Newfangled Ways the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Of Star-Gazing Albrecht Dürer
Of Old Fools the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Wanting to Know All Regions the Gnad-Her-Meister
Of Training Children Albrecht Dürer
Not Wanting to be a Fool Albrecht Dürer
Of Trouble-Making Albrecht Dürer
Not Understanding Raillery Albrecht Dürer
Not Following Good Advice Albrecht Dürer
Wanting to Escape Consequences of Evil Albrecht Dürer
Of Bad Manners Artist unknown
Not Providing in Advance Albrecht Dürer 
Of True Frienship Albrecht Dürer

Quarreling and Going to Court Albrecht Dürer
Disdain of the Holy Scriptures the Gnad-Her-Meister
Of Crude Fools Albrecht Dürer 12 Of Hasty Fools Artist unknown
Of Becoming a Cleric Albrecht Dürer
Of Wooing Albrecht Dürer
Of Great Boasting the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Of Arrogance Toward God Albrecht Dürer
Of Gamblers the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Of Foolish Plans Albrecht Dürer
Of Oppressed Fools Albrecht Dürer
Of Gluttony and Rebelling Albrecht Dürer
Highwaymen and Lawyers Albrecht Dürer
Of Useless Death the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Foolish Messengers Artist unknown
Of Serving Two Masters the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Of Cooks and Waiters Albrecht Dürer
Of Much Babbling the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Of Peasants' Squandering Albrecht Dürer 2
Of Finding Treasure Albrecht Dürer 7
Contempt of poverty Artist unknown
Not Practicing What You Preach the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Of Persisting in Good Albrecht Dürer
The Teaching of Wisdom Albrecht Dürer
Not Preparing For Death Albrecht Dürer
Of Overestimating One's Fortune
Of Too Much Care the Haintz-Nar-Meister r
Of God's Plagues and Punishments Albrecht Dürer
Of Unnecessary Wishes the Haintz-Nar-Meister
Of Foolish Trading Albrecht Dürer
Of Useless Studying Albrecht Dürer
Of Jabbering in the Choir Albrecht Dürer
He Who Judges Others Albrecht Dürer
Of Overbearing Pride Albrecht Dürer
Of Seeking Postponement Albrecht Dürer
Expecting Inheritance Albrecht Dürer
Of Guarding Wives Albrecht Dürer
Giving and Regretting It Albrecht Dürer
Fools, Far, Near, and Forever Albrecht Dürer

A Picture of the Speed of Light

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1787     History of Dots Series

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.--Leonard Cohen

I meant this title to this post quite literally—among the earliest mostly-accurate estimation for the speed of light (“c”) was made by Fizeau in 1849, and he not-literally made an image of what the speed of light “looked like”, the last dot in a crack that let the light in. It followed several hundred years of thinking on the speed of light including experiments employing lanterns (Galileo),  the Moons of Jupiter (Ole Roemer), rain and starlight (James Bradley), and which in turn followed thought experiments by Empedocles, Aristotle and Descartes, who reckoned the speed of light to be instantaneous.  The Parisian physicist Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau (September 23, 1819 – September 18, 1896) acted on a beautiful idea and constructed an elegant apparatus (again using lanterns) to make the first modern estimate of c.  And, basically, as soon as he was finished and published the results in the Comptes Rendus in 1849, Leon Foucault—with whom Fizeau worked on many occasions—improved the apparatus and made an even closer approximation.

 The way the apparatus worked was simple and powerful:  Fizeau observed a light through an optical apparatus with a rotating toothed gear between observer and the entry of the light source; a mirror that was more than 5 miles away reflected that beam back through those same geared teeth of the disk.  The disk could be made to rotate at specific speeds, the object being to calibrate the disk to prevent the light from going through the teeth of the gear to the mirror and then back again through the same gap.  The point at which the dot o flight disappeared could be easily calculated and the speed of light extrapolated from there--which Fizeau estimated to be 313,300 Km/s or 194,410 miles/second. (In 1850 Foucault replaced the toothed gear with a mirror and produced a more accurate estimate of 185,093 miles/second, which in fact turns out to be very close to c. 

Historical Estimates of c in Km/s

From Blood Flow to Little Nemo--Sequential Illustrations of Ideas and Stories

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1786

It is intriguing to see ideas are communicated when drawn as a series of events on a single piece of paper--a single-panel, progressive illustration showing the sequential development of an idea.  This thought struck me while looking at some of the work of J.J. Grandville (above, "Les Metamorphoses du sommeil", from his book Un Autre Monde, a proto-surrealist work printed in 1844) ) and caused me to think about how old this idea might be, how far back it stretched into the sciences and literature.  And right now, I really don't have the answer.

Again, what I'm thinking about is a single-sheet describing an action or thought--not like what might be the earliest example of the "comic book" the Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1827) by Rodolphe Toepffer (Geneva, 1799–1846) but more like Little Nemo in Slumberland, by Winsor McKay (the following example from 1905).  The difference between the two in composition is simply that McKay in his Sunday comics efforts would develop the story on a single sheet of paper, so that you are in a way watching the story unfold as a motion picture would; and in the case of Toepffer, the story is told more in a conventional graphic novel way--in a book over dozens or hundreds of pages, with one illustration per page.  (I wonder about including Egyptian and Mixtec hieroglyphics, but I don't think that they apply.)

What seems like an early ready-made example of the sequential imaging of an idea on one piece of paper might be from the great William Harvey's  De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (On the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals), which was printed in 1628, and which in an iconic display shows Harvey's demonstration of blood operating in a closed system, and circulated by the heart, and undergoing a "a motion in a circle".

[Source:  this image from Exercitationes Anatomicae, De Motu Cordis & Sanguinis Circulatione.. Rotterdam: Arnoldus Leers, 1660..]