JF Ptak Science Books LLC (Image Post)
I've always been attracted to antique prints showing distant horizons engulfed by a big (and preferably blank) sky, though in a pinch of a human landscape made miniscule by an enormous starry sky will do just fine. In any event the images below are unusual for their depictions of Big Sky--a hard thing to translate on a little piece of paper.
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JF Ptak Science Books (Image Post)
I had intended to write a full post on this schematic of Churchill's war-time bunker--about a possible future that never came to be--but it has escaped me, though, the I just couldn't let go of the date--(June 14) now late--for the formation of the second part of the title of this short post. (I guess it will become an entry later on in a life-in-the-ground series.) But I thought at least to publish the images of where--the war was fought--and especially, where the Battle of Britain was waged in the middle and later months of 1940--rather than about the other underground war (or warriors) were getting ready to fight an entirely different sort of war. I'm referring to the Auxilliers, the "Scallywags", fighters in the league of "ungentlemanly warfare", the 6,000 or so guerrilla fighters who were being readied to fight the Nazis for the Battle of Britain on British soil by a means other than direct military engagement. Major Colin McVean Gubbins was in charge of this operation (the Special Operations Executive), and he sought people "who knew the forests, the woods, the mines, the old dosed shafts, the hills, the moors, the glens--people who know their local stuff", people who wouldn't be found, in order to produce a devastating and terminal underground fighting force. Interestingly the headquarters for the SOE was moved by September 1940 to 64 Baker Street, thus giving the folks there the nickname of the "Baker Street Irregulars".
I should point out that the SOE was very active in different theatres for the vast part of the war--I'm just concentrating now on what could've been their operations in the U.K.
These were the fighters who led calm lives during the day who would hen turn into fighters by night who would do absolutely anything to fight the Nazi invading force. But that's another story (and ably told by John Warwicker in Churchill's Underground Army). I've bumped into other stories of what the British were planning to do in the face of Nazi invasion and occupation--there was of course stockpiling of materiel and intelligence in removed locations, digging bunkers, readying boobytraps, and so on, but also aggressive scorched earth plans that involved flooding, sinking part of the Navy, destroying munitions, and so forth: desperate things, heroic measures, to fight to the last. And I absolutely believe that Brits would've done every bit of that, fought to the very last possible end and effort, every person doing what was expected of them.
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JF Ptak Science Books
There is an invisible thread running through this blog on the history of squares, starting with Euclid and winding its way through Mondrian, Klee and Malevich and Boullee, atom bomb resistant countries, pixels, perfect, Times, magic, and so on. I don't think that I've ever touched on what might be my own solitary and perhaps-wrong observation on the preponderance of green squares in 1950's linoleum flooring. As I said, this might be because of my own faulty receptors--and even if I'm slightly correct the color I think doesn't mean or imply anything in particular. Perhaps the abundance of green comes from a left-over paint or dye that a manufacturer decided to bump into flooring; or perhaps green just looked better to the readers of LIFE magazine than other colors. Be that as it may, there is some loose strand of memory that gets activated every time I see green squares in flooring of the 1950's, and I just wanted to say that I noticed it.
Continue reading "The Color Green in the History of Squares" »
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JF Ptak Science Books Post 1056 (First post in our History of Noses series)
There is an entire dictionary of explanations for this odd image (appearing in LIFE magazine for 14 September 1953). Here's a candidate launched from this blog's Museum of Impossible Things department: the photograph accompanies a newspaper clipping from the Library of Congress' Newspaper Clippings Collections!, an above-the-fold front-page obituary for a man with an unusual obsession, as follows:
[Source: Obituary from the Stationary News, from At, Texas. ]
<clip> "The Mystery of the Secret Painter of At, Solved!" <clip>
"Gileless, Newton. After a long illness of undescribed origin and affect, Mr Newton Gileless, at home. Newton was born in Aint, Texas before moving to At in 1916 “to get away from the negativeness”. He had few friends and distant neighbors, and was fond of keeping overturned muffin-stuffed cowboy boots on his fence posts. He donated hard pancakes to the bench-sitting old men down by the Rexall, and kept a large box at the Post Office."
"Mr. Gileless’ prime mover of community interest was his secretive painting practices. For decades Mr. Gileless could be seen scurrying around town, or at in the fields, or along the dusty roads, or at the stream near the peach trees, carrying a large easel with a canvas attached with yards of "paintin' rope".. He could be seen painting but only from a distance, as distance of quietness seemed the enabler for his painterly ambitions. The object of his interests was not known"
"Mr. Gileless’ estate was left to Bo Tanger, the regional coroner, who administered the last wishes and who revealed the close secret. “I finally got to see what Newton was painting”, said Tanger, "and its odd, even for here, where people's business is their own in private, and his was public-private".
[Photo: 2nd grade class with their happy bequest of Mr. Gileless' artwork at At, Texas Primary School.]
"Mr. Gileless' continued artist pursuit was painting Color-by-Numbers portraits of Vaudevillean, comic and movie actor Jimmy Durante. There were more than 6,250 of these portraits found in Gileless' barn. His will instructs (and provides the funds for) their distribution to 'as many good Texan second-graders as possible. Yes.' And so it was this that Mr. Gileless was painting in his secret painterly way, painting again and again, hoping for the colors to improve with exposure to different surroundings, especially and evidently en plein air."
"When overly prompted on the mysterious Durante muse, Mr. Tang responded: 'Well sir, I don't know. But Durante has showbusiness' biggest nose, and Mr Gilieless had but a scant smidgeon. Maybe it was soulful envy.' " --Buck Smeal for the At Tattler Texas, 1 September 1953.
Notes.
1. The Library of Congress decided in the midst of a space-saving fit to save only “necessary” bits from its newspaper collections and to discard the rest. “We aren’t Mr. Borges”, one library staffer volunteered, “and we just thought that all of the other challenged stuff had to go”. The Library’s reduction removed 92% of the newspaper collection “bulk”. Another source said that “if you look at it in one way, what we dumped was mostly nothing, ‘cause the printed page is mostly white space and unused”.
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JF Ptak Science Books Post 1055
(Including a short tale of when Winston Churchill's nephew, John Spencer Churchill, wound up passed out on the back seat of my 1979 Chrysler New Yorker.)
This map pretty well tells the story of the perilous situation of Europe and England at the beginning of June, 1940. It appeared in the Illustrated London News on the heals of Churchill's "Blood, Soil, Sweat and Tears" speech, and was a very frank presentation of the wearing of the war. By this point in the war Nazi Germany had successfully invaded Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, sweeping across Europe in a broad westward movement, backing up British and French troops all the way to the sea at Dunkerque, where a monumental rescue operation ("Operation Dynamo") saved them. (There was an enormous amount of materiel left there on the beach, a devastating loss for the British Expeditionary Force, nearly crippling it.) This was a bad time for the Allies, this part of the war coined by Winston Churchill in 18 June 1940 in the House of Commons by: "The Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin". There was very little good that came of these few months for the U.K and the Allies, though four things do stand out: (1) as I just mentioned, the saving of 300,000+ troops at Dunkerque; (2) the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, (3) the coming of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister of the U.K., and (4) the first deciphering of the Enigma at Bletchley. Other than that, the situation was dim, and these invasion routes (published at t he very time that Germany was studying such a feat in its "Operation Sea Lion", or "Unternehmen Seelöwe").
The endgame at Dunkerque took place almost four years to the day of the invasion of Europe, when the intent (though not placement) all of these arrows were turned around for the Allied operation at the Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944..
It came to pass in 1985 that some friends and I had drinks with John Spencer Churchill, a man who was at Dunkerque and who reported on it to his uncle Winston. (A slightly longer story on this meeting with Mr. Churchill appears below.) After much else I finally asked Mr. Churchill if there was any particular sound that he remembered from being at Dunkerque. I do not recall his phrasing, but what he said was that the beach at Dunkerque was rocky, pebbly, and that the sound made by tens of thousands of boots on that shore was "disgusting". He also said that the mixture of petrol, wind and grit burned the eyes and tasted bad. It was of course fascinating to hear a first hand description, especially a memory of something so uncommon and visceral. It was unexpected to me, though now when i read about Dunkirque I can imagine its smell thanks to this encounter.
First Address by Winston Churchill as Prime Minister.
Continue reading "Dunkerque to D-Day, from the Invasion of England to the Invasion of Europe" »
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JF Ptak Science Books
One of the things that I've not thought of before was the invention of luxury for the working poor.
The first comfortable chair, the first luxurious chair,. ever bought by a member of the working, laboring class was purchased in the United States on July 23, 1852 at 11.11 in the morning.
Or perhaps not.
But what did happen around this time was that a commodity that was over and above the absolute necessity--say for an upholstered chair with springs--did become available en masse to the vast majority of working/poor Americans. Or at least that's what I'm thinking. The Industrial Revolution, now 80 years old or so, began to rub up against objects that we're formerly only available through extended labor and craftsman but were now becoming widely accessible and for cheap because of mechanized production.
So, for example, the stuffed comfy chair which had been the nearly exclusive domain of the middle- and wealthy classes were now patented inventions that were mass produced, their cost coming down because of the ease of production and the vast new demand. The industrialization of luxury found its true invention in mid-century Americas and was subject to enormous variation and tremendously expanded development--so much so that in just the next few decades there would be massively distributed catalogs containing almost nothing but eminently affordable necessaries and new luxuries. By the 1880s the mail order catalog was becoming commonplace, as was the ability for the poorer classes to purchase formerly unaffordable objects--luxury for the masses had been discovered, and an enormous consuming class had been invented.
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JF Ptak Science Books Post 1054 The History of Dots series
[Thanks to Randall Rosenfeld of the University of Toronto for sparking this post!]
It seems that few people now remember Frederick William Herschel as a great discoverer of alternative existences, but, well, that's pretty much what he did--and he did it during a time that must've made his astronomical discoveries seem like science fiction .For example, in 1785 Herschel published a revolutionary image of the “Stellar System” (the Milky Way), showing its irregular pattern and the off-center placement of our sun amidst a panoply of other stars.
(His image was remarkably and substantially correct, with the most grievous error being the placement of the sun too close to the center of the galaxy.) It was an image which bought the concept of a not so humano-centric idea into popular philosophy, and that our sun was a star among stars in a sea of stars1.
Not only that, but Herschel also made observations on double stars that showed that Newton's laws of gravitation extended throughout the universe, and that it was possible for the stars themselves to submit to these laws and react to each other. After constructing his mammoth four-foot telescope, Herschel expanded the observable sky multifold, showing that there was a possible 75 million stars now available for study. And if the stars were behaving like planets then the actions of our own solar system seem perhaps to be not so unique; and with all of these new stars the possibilities for new planets and new solar system (and with that the possibilities for other life forms) seems a greater possibility.
And on these new worlds in these new solar systems there was therefore the possibility of two or more suns, meaning that there could be sets of shadows cast by anyone/thing on the surfaces of any of these new worlds.
In fact Herschel was able to show that our own Sun was following a prescribed path through the Milky Way, making Sol much less of spectacular enigma of mythical importance and more of just another starry dot in a sea of dots. And while he was making the Sun into a starry dot he was also resolving those other starry dots into something of greater understanding and significance, bringing them into a systemic mechanism of the universe.
Herschel also made an alpha/omega kind of discovery, as well--he marveled at nebulous "holes"2 that he was finding in the Milky Way, thinking that, perhaps, he was looking into the very soul of the universe, at the place where stars were born.
This is extraordinary stuff coming to use from 200 years ago. Few people have made such enormous and concrete contributions with such far reaching intellectual and philosophical implications. So hats-off tonight to Frederick William Herschel, a man with big eyes.
Notes:
1. This galacto-centric view remained until the work of Harlow Shapley's globular clusters in 1918.
2. Specifically his famous and luscious "Coalsack" nebula.
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If 100 million one gallon jugs of oil were set side-by-side in a line it would stretch across the country and back again.
If you had started to fill your car with 100,000,000 gallons of BP oil --it would've been Amoco Oil--you would've started a little before the October 1973 gas shortage (at a rate of 5 gallons a minute).
If on a clear night the best the human eye could see is 6,000 stars, and if each star represented a gallon of oil, it would take 40 years of clear nights to represent the BP disaster.Hopefully it won’t take 40 years to clean this mess.
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Incidentally, you should check out the insipid history BP has provided for itself at its website For example:
"Our history is full of discoveries, starting in 1908 with oil found in a rugged part of Persia after a long and difficult search. Since then, discoveries large and small (and sometimes just in the nick of time) have fuelled our progress."
Is this written for first graders?
"In our story, you may make a few discoveries of your own. Winston Churchill gives a rousing speech. The Smurfs cause a traffic jam. Our employees help construct a giant spool, build the world’s largest deepwater pipeline and bring solar power to remote villages in the Philippines."
It also looks like BP has misspelled "fueled" and "deep water" on their own website. Nice attention to detail!
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JF Ptak Science Books
At point point in 1944, there were 4,890 American B-17s in service (as part of an overall artime production of 350,000 aircraft). This is what 4,890 B-17s might look like:
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JF Ptak Science Books Post 1052
Somehow I think that I've missed these ads of women pushing alcohol over narcotics and other drugs. It certainly seems a more elegant solution to the "unwinding problem" of the more-or-less semi-idle privileged classes.
At this point in the history of addiction in the United States all of the “any other drugs” that this woman is referring to were legal–very big drugs and very legal. The opium trade was of course still very much alive and well, England and to a lesser degree France doing their brightest to bring the best (where “best” means “most”) narcotics to the world inside and outside of the Golden Triangle, ruining as much as humanly possible while doing so. Opium was the drug of choice, followed by morphine (which Dr. Alex Wood discovered in 1843 was better introduced into the body by injection) and then graduating to heroin. (Heroin was synthesized first by C.R. Wright, who boiled out some morphine on a stove. It was Heinrich Dreser who introduced diacetylmorphne in 1895 as the Bayer Company product called “Heroin”, which was marketed as a pleasant step-down to morphine addicts in 1898.)
So sparkling mixer with gin was the better part of valor for the Heublein company, even with legal heroin and morphine and opium to compete with. It wasn’t until 1905 that a “ban” on opium came into effect in the U.S., though the first federal attempt to control narcotics did not appear until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 (which required those dispensing narcotics to (a) register and (b) pay a tax).
But the sale and consumption of narcotics wasn’t made illegal until 1923, brought about through the U.S. Treasury Department’s Division of Narcotics. This unfortunately came about 222 years after the Chinese Emperor Kia King ban all opium products in China, subverted forty years later by the Brits.
The queer part of this story is that narcotics were banned in 1923, three years after the 18th Amendment to the U.S. prohibited the sale and use of alcohol.
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It is D-Day+24,090--it is that many days since the beginning o the Allied invasion of Europe, begun on this day in 1944. It was almost four years to the day that Britain lost Europe, backed up to the channel on the pebbled beaches of Dunkerque, 300,000 British Expeditionary Forces (and 100,000 French) waiting to be rescued from a very bad situation, penned in by Nazi forces that never did make the final assault on their nearly-captured prey. The BEF was severely compromised in the evacuation, and the possibility of an invasion of England was real. Four years later, 66 years ago today, it was all over but the fighting, the Allies launching the greatest military assault in history, beginning the endgame of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
This is a picture of my Uncle Walt (Dad's side) who is posing alongside the six stars proudly displayed by my great grandparents in the front windows of their house in Housatonic, Massachusetts--that's six stars signifying six members of the household (six bothers) who were fighting in the war. These were blue stars--thankfully, no gold star needed to be sewn over any of the blue ones, though this was tragically not the case with our relatives.
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JF Ptak Science Books Post 1051
It is unusual for me to find provocative photos that are more unusual in context rather than out. But this is certainly the case here, with these photos of gun porn from Life magazine of 1947. This photo spread was meant to celebrate the launch of a “harmless” toy gun, the manufacturer demonstrating this point by having two dozen dinner quests shell dining room targets with imitation Tommy Gun-ish pellet guns.
Perhaps appropriate in more ways than one are these two older men shooting “ineffectually” at a model dressed in balloons–the point being to break the balloons to reveal her nakedness. But the ejected pellets hit and dribble away, the rubber balloons remaining intact, with the foiled men left feeling “astonished and distressed”. You can almost smell their impending failure in this picture (as well as the relief of the model).
Then there’s the Holiness of the Gun moment, a father holding the toy gun in flattened palms., making himself a portable altar for his respectful sons, a deep reverence for the object present in the man’s face.
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JF Ptak Science Books Post 1050
The great beauty of beauty is its great unidentifiable qualities–unidentified that is until they are identified, quantified, signified, geometized, libeling the concept of beauty until it is nothing but a soured criminal contempt.
In an antiquarian sense one way of establishing what “beauty” meant in a particular time is by looking at painting or sculpture, the idealized form representing gods and goddesses of strength and beauty and grace. For more recent times of less idolatry and more commercialization advertisements using images of women to sell whatever product the seller was trying to push on the viewer could also be used as a certain standard of attraction and beauty. (Assuming of course that we are talking about the recent past when images other than the product itself were being used to try and establish a desire and loyalty to the product. In the history of publishing, this is a relatively recent innovation that I think belongs to the 19th century and not before.) In the case of using pretty women, the advertiser was trying to associate their product with a certain sense of beauty, or to at least attract the attention of a lazy reader to look at their coal tar soap because a pretty face was lined up next to it.
Another interesting way of evaluating beauty could be found in the evolution of Barbie Dolls or GI Joes. Or you could consult William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty. And many other things of course, that deal with beauty in the human form (and more, or orders of magnitude more, that deal with beauty outside of ourselves, beauty in the forms of architecture or mathematics or the arrangement of sand or whatever).
I’m just going to give beauty 700 words here, or so, and so I’ll concentrate on just one picture of comparative beauty. (I guess that there have been 100 billion words written about beauty, though if you loosened up the definition of what ‘writing about beauty” mean, the number could probably be squeezed up to a trillion, which would mean 4 million books of 250k words each. Probably the 10^10 is a better guess.) As it turns out it is a picture from a story in Life magazine for 30 June 1947 of Psyche–the Greek goddess of the soul–used as the logo for White Rock soft drink company’s mineral water. In general it’s a poor depiction of the goddess, and I’m not so sure that they even had the goddess in mind when the whole thing came into the bottler’s mind (she is after all described as a “sprite” in the LIFE magazine article).
What is of interest is the change in the image of Psyche on the face of the bottle over the years (shown here for 1893, 1924 and 1947) which is graphically depicted with measurement appraisals.
Psyche simply buffed up a little, getting taller, slimming down and generally made to be a little more common. She did loose her nipples in 1947, or at least they became obscured, trailing away from their depiction in 1893. (I once attended a U.S. Supreme Court argument on a case dealing with nipples and pasties and strip clubs. It was a little bizarre, and as my mind wandered I took an interest in the court’s decoration, and particularly the frescoes–which of course included a full-nippled woman, staring down at the court from her height.)
But it struck me that Psyche was simply becoming a more-generic depiction of beauty, which reminded me of this odd bit of beauty sanitizing prevalent among the wealthy of today, or at least among those–actors and advertising types–whose image helps set the stage for the beauty standard. Now it is possible to vastly augment your appearance via surgical procedures to the common standard of what has been established as “beautiful”. And the end result of this is that there is merging a certain sameness among the people whose faces everyone seems to know, and whose appearances change the way people think of beauty. I find it striking that someone (for example) like the actor Sharon Stone would turn her face into a common mask of someone else entirely, closing the ranks of differentiation in what is presented to mass market audiences as “beauty”. Everyone is starting to look like everyone else, or so at least among movie actors.
And so it is perhaps finally appropriate that I chose Psyche to discuss here, because if the actors tend towards these procedures more and more, they’ll all be wearing the same sort of frozen mask that their ancient Greek precursors used to wear when in performance.
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JF Ptak Science Books Post 1049
The West, the American West, had the foundations for effective an grid delivered by the late 1870's, in the early-middle of what I guess people would consider the high Cowboy days of westward expansion. But the exploration part had been mostly done by this point, as had the expansion bit, the exterior sections of the compartmentalization of the frontier taking place in ever-smaller concentric squares. As I wrote earlier in this blog, it was the introduction of lines that really did the whole Wild West thing in--the introduction of the railroads, of course (followed by the refrigerated railroad car, which did in the great cattle drives and established needed-to-be-peopled rail heads all over the place), telegraph lines, and of course barbed wire. Barbed wire meant barbed wire fences, fences that could be constructed for a small fraction of the cost of wooden fences and which replaced of course no fences at all, dividing the great open plains into more manageable units of owned and regulated land. (Barbed wire fences also needed far less maintenance than wooden fences, which means fewer cowboys riding fences for upkeep and so on.)
By the time the eulogy on the American Frontier was famously delivered by Fred Jackson Taylor in 1893, the fate of the West had already been sealed for perhaps two decades, though the notion of its "closedness" was received with considerable shock. It was time for the truly great equalizer and innovative settler of the West to makes its appearance--boredom.
I think it might be that it was the Boring Frontier that nailed the coffin shut on the Western Frontier. Once all of the lines had been delivered--barbed wire, telegraph, railroads, good maps--the greatest thing left to do was the settling. And nothing quite spells settlement than boredom. Or comparative boredom. Once the essentials of conquest had been delivered in terms of the civilizing lines, it became time to wait for the rest of it, surviving through cold Nebraska winters and hot Panhandle summers, waiting for the rest of America to come and settle. It was the Boredom Frontier that spelled out the intent that the changes brought to that country were there to stay.
And barely three decades after the announcement of the closing of the frontier, automobiles were making their way across the land on new roads., which snaked their way deeper into the last-reached parts of the country. It was very soon after the car and the road that the roadside billboard appeared, and appeared in such great quantity that legislation prohibiting banner display like this was introduced into the legal system during the teens.
Roads provided the last assault on the West, and brought with them their singular colonizing irony of billboards, which prohibited the view of the country through which their roads snaked and pulled. And there's something terribly wrong with that, as witnessed in this 1931 illustration tucked inside this almost-provocatively-named pamphlet, Billboards ad Aesthetic Legislation, New Applications of Police Power (published by the St. Louis Public Library).It is astonishing to think of the vast changes that took place in the remaining American frontier, taking place so quickly--two generations separated the last of the great cattle drives to billboard legislations along auto routes in the western states.
It seems to me that I've seen a similar illustration of the senseless explorer from the 'teens, though I cannot find it now.
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I just wanted to post this for the sake of posting it, and to make sure that I'll never have these photos misplaced again.
These pictures were made in 2002 just before we left DC for Asheville and show our older daughter, Emma, then 10, romping around the WH and Press Corps Room with a friend. We were there courtesy of a friend of our's, and the kids were given a long leash to move around. 
After a bit of posing Emma and her friend started running/skipping, and soon were out of the side door of the press room and on their way to the Oval Office, which as it tuns out is not all that far away. The children found it by accident and very easily--almost instantly there was an enormous voice that yelled, "you there, HALT" (just the thing I guess you would not want to hear while skipping towards the Oval Office), and the children did a sort of turn-while-in-mid-air cartoon turnaround sorta thing and came running back down the hall, pretty well put out, a
memory made.
It was a fun time had by all.
I'll tell the story at another time of when Emma slapped Bill Clinton. True.
(And yes this was the pre-renovation Briefing Room).
The West Wing.
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