JF Ptak Science Books

The Data Mine: the French Census of 1911 and Storing Numbers on Paper

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 835 

Today’s post on the tabulating office of the French 1911 Census seems quite natural following yesterday’s of the reading-and-writing (French) fireproof man...

 

Like many other countries, the French were certainly not playing to the technological audience in conducting their census of 1911, the physical, tabulating part of it looking much as it did in the 1880’s.  Granted, the United States was dragged somewhat into the new high-tech age of tabulating for its 1890 census, but it was absolutely and clearly shown that the Herman Hollerith machines and methods were vastly superior to those previous used, giving the government extraordinary new insights into the way in which the country functioned—a Hubble Telescope-like impact for those interested in more and more-manipulable data.   

What interests me in these photos are the endless stacks of paper, and what I imagine was the quiet of the job of the paper-stack-classifier, all of whom seem to be heavily dressed…I guess that you couldn’t keep a dry heat around exposed paper like that for fear of (a) well, possible fire and (b) drying the documents out and making them fragile and unusable.   

The image below shows two men using the Thacher Calculating Instrument, a large, cylindrical slide rule¹.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

This man is using an arithmometer, invented  by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar in 1820.  It was employed, as we can clearly see, well into the 20^th century even though it had been far superseded.   

 

The U.S. government, on the other hand, wasn’t so much taken by the astronomical range of new statistics that flowed from the Hollerith machines as it was the astronomical bill for their use.  The 1880 census had cost about $6 million and took 9 years to tabulate; the 1890 census using the Hollerith machines cost $10 million and took seven years.  The main focus of many in government was the cost differential—not the incredible amounts of new controllable information.  The rent of the Hollerith machines was only $750,000 for the conduct of the entire census, so the differential must’ve been in the extra utility costs (for electricity, for example, which was used for the first time to run the tabulators) and for the small army of statisticians and data entry people.  Be that as it may, the government was not amused, particularly when Hollerith figured that he had actually saved the government $5 million.    The two parties left each other grumbling, though the roar of the trickle down from the Hollerith success drowned it out.  The tabulating system was quickly exported, and large private concerns in the U.S. saw a savior in the system that would soon rescue them from the sea of paper in which they were beginning to drown.   The Hollerith company did very, very well for itself, and soon merged with three other companies (in 1911) to ease the burden of success.  The resulting company was called the Computing-Tabulating-Research Company (CTR), which after a short while became the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM).  

Image source:  The Illustrated London News, 11 March 1911.  

 Notes:

1.The following description is from the wonderful SlideRuleMuseumsite;

“Thacher's Calculating Instrument - Patented in 1881 by Edwin Thacher. Originally made by W.F. Stanley, in London, but, by 1897, Keuffel & Esser had taken over production. an 1884 instruction book notes, "The original rule in use is 12 inches long, with radii of II and 5 1/2 inches, the divisions of which are cut by hand, copying from a machine divided plate. In the present instrument the radii are 60 and 30 feet, the divisions of which are printed directly from machine divided plates. Those plates contain over 33,000 divisions, calculated to seven places of decimals from Babbage's tables by using a common multiplier, every line being subjected to correction for error of screw and temperature variations, so that possibly every line center is within .0001 inch of its true place." The instrument consists of a cylindrical slide, which admits of both rotary and longitudinal movement within an open metallic framework of 20 equidistant triangular bars. The bars are connected to rings at their ends which admit rotation within standards attached to the base. Upon the slide are wrapped two complete logarithmic scales, each of which is divided into 40 parts of length equal to half that of the slide. The parts follow each other in regular order around the cylinder, and the figures and divisions which constitute any part of the right are repeated on the left, one line in advance. By the rotary and longitudinal movement of the slide any of its divisions may be brought opposite to or in contact with any division on the fixed scales. The divisions on the upper lines are transferred to the slide by means of a pointer fitting over the bars, which is also convenient for retaining the position of any division on either line while the slide is being revolved into the required position. Near the commencement of each scale on the slide is a heavy black mark designed to catch the eye.”

A Smiling Man at Work in a Smokey Fire, 1788

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There’s not much that I can say at this point about C.J. Leroux,  the author of the work in which this magnificent engraving was  published, Decouverte contre les incendies...¹ Without a pretty good library to hike to Leroux’s efforts remain a mystery to me, except for what I can deduce from the image.  The shack in the image is burning, and the man inside is fine, evidently protected from the fire by a special suit made of fire-resistant materials.  It is an interesting idea in protecting people from fire—sidestepping the issue of making the house more fire resistant by making the people in the house resistant to fire.  I suspect that the inventor/designer/theorist of such a gown had in mind the sale of millions of such things—that way if a fire struck a house in a dense section of Paris the entire neighborhood would don their suits and escpae the flames.  The neighborhood might not survive, but the people would.  That might not be the chief interest of the royals at that time who I am sure would be more interested in the physical plant and the real estate than the people crawling around inside it.  This display also begs the question of manufacturing the house so that some portion of it would be fire resistant which would (perhaps) save neighboring dwelling. 

Be that as it may, it really didn’t matter, as the materials for creating such a suit as the test man is wearing didn’t yet exist. Certainly nothing existed at the time that would allow someone to read, write and work through smoke and flames in a fiery furnace (“fournaise ardente”) all the while with  no inconvenience (“en etre incommode”)². The large mushroom-shaped cap would be a supply of oxygen, I guess; the smile on the face of the suit must betray a secret knowledge as to why the paper and pen are not on fire. 

It seems to be a nice piece of different thinking.

Notes:

1.  Full title:  Découverte contre les incendies, les dangers des eaux, de l'air méphytique ou contagieux et de plusieurs autres maux qui affligent l'humanité, avec un supplément contre les dangers des voyages et des chutes. Par C. J. Leroux  Published and printed by the author in 36 pages in Paris, 1788. 

2. The legend reads: “ Experience d’une personne qui lit, ecrit,  travaille, &c. dans une fournaise ardente, au  milieu des flames et de la fume, ans en  etre incommode.”

Blank and Missing Things Thread #56: William S. Burroughs Self-Portrait

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 833

I think that William Burroughs  is vastly under appreciated as a driving force behind American  mid-20^th century dark comedy.  For a lot of  people the thing missing from reading his books and shorter pieces is the laughter.  The few times that I saw him read in the early 1980’s the audience roared—his deep, flat-and-rolling-at-the-same-time delivery pushed this forward, as did the very manipulative lines in his face (which drolly sprang into action at unexpected times, like punctuation marks).  In any event, he was funny throughout, a point perhaps lost to folks considering his work as a serious statement
on sumpin’ sumpin’. My opinion may very well be a minority, but I see Old Bill as a serious comedian in a dark sweaty Swiftian mold. 

 

One of the times that I interviewed him was at the 9:30 Club in DC (in its antique incantation, an interesting venue showcasing unusual performers in a ruined brine of alcohol and urine).  He was not anxious to be talked to after his reading, and I could hardly get the man to move, though he did become a little animated when pursued about man-machine confluence in the not-too-distant future.  At the end of it, I asked—insisted—that he draw a self-portrait, something I had been asking of folks that I was coming into contact with.  Burroughs did not want to do it, saying something like ”no one is interested in what I draw myself to look like”.  But I told him that I was.  And he did it.

He grumbled and flicked-out this disdainful self portrait, a very tentative and light effort compared to the title that he gave my interview (for my reel-to-reel tape box) just moments earlier. 

 

 

I’ve always found his self-portrait to be pretty creepy—but he did have an awkward and condescendingly dark sense of humor about it--the only thing not missing from the self-portrait was its disturbance(s).

Blank and Missing Things Thread #55: Missing Motion

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 A History of Blank and Missing Things Thread #55

This lovely and lonely engraving comes from Vincent Wing’s (1643-1726)  Geodaetes practicus Redivius¹ (The Art of Surveying…), a book printed in London in 1700.  It is a classic work and much used for over a hundred years—but I’m focused solely in this illustration for triangulating in the woods.  It is the image of a stationary forest, a collection of neat trees devoid of movement and motion and mission, a collection of solitaries, missing wind.  I find it remarkable for being an illustration that manages to show the missing things that you cannot really see. 

 

1. The full title of this work:  Geodaetes practicus redivivus, the art of surveying: formerly publish'd by Vincent Wing, math., now much augmented and improv'd, with an appendix thereunto subjoin'd, shewing the whole art of surveying by a new instrument, called the emperial table : performing exactly in all respects, and in all cases that can possibly happen in the practical part of surveying, the work of the theodolite, circumserentor, semi-circle, chard and needle : with the description and use of a new quadrant : to which is added by way of supplement, scientia stellarum, containing new and accurate tables of the planetary motions, whereby the planets places both in longitude and latitude, the places of the fixed stars, with the eclipses of the luminaries, are more easily attain'd, than by any yet extant / by John Wing

Dotting the "i" in Copernicus: Correcting Errors in Epochal Works

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There’s nothing quite like writing a revolutionary work than correcting one—and correcting a work that actually needed it.  In the world of epochal efforts, that subset of work that was needed for substantial re-arrangement and correction of The Big Idea is a small one indeed.  In the period from 1875-1915 or so, when virtually every discipline in the West underwent groundbreaking change, none that I can think of offhand needed sweeping revisions, or revisions at all.  Granted, you can’t really “correct” Schoenberg or Strindberg or Joyce or Kandinsky for mistakes, but you can do that for Roentgen or Einstein or Planck or Boltzmann.  But it wasn’t necessary for the big thinking in the sciences.  This is what the today-little-known Erasmus Reinhold (1511-1553) knew needed to be done with Copernicus’ De Revoultionibus (of 1543)—as attested to so somewhat later by Johannes Kepler.  As a matter of fact, according to the Dictionary of Science Biography¹, a vast and superb 20-volume keystone repository of necessary information, Kepler referred to the necessary corrections as  a “huge and disagreeable task”(vol XI, p 366)  but absolutely essential to make the work less cumbersome and slow and more handy and, well, useful.

Reinhold’s book, Prutenicae Tabulae Coelestium Motuum, was speedily done and shows the work of master mathematician, appeared in 1551, delayed as it was for a few years by war.  It instantly became an exceptionally influential book, computationally brilliant and even superior to Copernicus, with the Tables² replacing those of the master, and which were bettered only by those of Kepler’s own Rudolphine Tables³. Eramus’ book presented the first astronomical tables based on Copernicus’ work, but the work as a whole slipped by the heliocentric system, which Erasmus chose to not engage. But he certainly did the necessary corrections for De Revolutionibus⁴, further helping  Copernicus slay the astronomical monsters of ancient construction.   The Principia is another issue… 

Notes:

1. Owen Gingerich, who wrote the “Erasmus” entry for the DSB, 
referred to him as the most influential astronomical 
pedagogue of his generation.  Erasmus also published a 
commentary on Georg Peuerbach's Theoricae Novae 
Planetarum in 1542 as well as one on the first book of Ptolemy's 
Almagest in 1549.

2.  The Prutenic Tables were named for both Copernicus and the man who financed their publication, Erasmus supporter and benefactor Duke Albrecht of Prussia (whose influence seems to have been initially gained for Erasmus by Philip Melanchton).

3. Johannes Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables(Tabulae Rudolphinae)  were published in 1627 and cosnsited of a star catalog and planetary tables based on the extraordinary collection of data and observations of Tycho Brahe.

4. The entire TRANSLATED work is located here.

In the preface to De revolutionibus Copernicus takes on the ancient masters like Ptolemy and Aristotle with a steel glove:   “But meanwhile they introduced a good many ideas which apparently contradict the first principles of uniform motion. Nor could they elicit or deduce from the eccentrics the principal consideration, that is, the structure of the universe and the true symmetry of its parts. On the contrary, their experience was just like some one taking from various places hands, feet, a head, and other pieces, very well depicted, it may be, but not for the representation of a single person; since these fragments would not belong to one another at all, a monster rather than a man would be put together from them. Hence in the process of demonstration or "method", as it is called, those who employed eccentrics are found either to have omitted something essential or to have admitted something extraneous and wholly irrelevant. This would not have happened to them, had they followed sound principles. For if the hypotheses assumed by them were not false, everything which follows from their hypotheses would be confirmed beyond any doubt. Even though what I am now saying may be obscure, it will nevertheless become clearer in the proper place.”  

5. Copernicus also had some pretty strong stuff to say about the great early scholar Lactantius:

“Perhaps there will be babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy although completely ignorant of the subject and, badly distorting some passage of Scripture to their purpose, will dare to find fault with my undertaking and censure it. I disregard them even to the extent of despising their criticism as unfounded. For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise an illustrious writer but hardly an astronomer, speaks quite childishly about the earth's shape, when he mocks those who declared that the earth has the form of a globe. Hence scholars need not be surprised if any such persons will likewise ridicule me. Astronomy is written for astronomers.”  

 

Emerging from Clouds: Artificial Legs and the Foot of God

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This busy and still beautifully designed woodcut from Amrbose Pare’s Opera Chirurgica… was printed in 1594 and holds special fascinations for me.  First of all it is a pioneering work on artificial limbs, and secondly, and tritely, I like the floating ribbons and ties (some of which seem to come from clouds).  First on Pare (1510-1590):  this was a revolutionary work of an extraordinary figure (even though there are some who suspected that not all of this book was his own work) and was the greatest surgeon of his era and the doctor to four kings. He was responsible for the invention of numerous surgical instruments; he also re-introduced the ligature  into surgical procedures for amputations, wrote on carbon monoxide poisoning, introduced the introduction of induced labor, created the reimplantation of teeth, was a pioneer of treating battlefield wounds and was one of the first to write on medical ethics and jurisprudence, and much else.

 But I’m sorry to say that I am fixated on the artificial leg-cloud.   And the floating bits. 

This brigs me back to a post here from just two days ago on Antiquarian Dadaism and the emblems of Scarlattini…and which is probably the only chance I’ll ever have to make  for connections of feet-from-clouds.  Or near-feet from clouds and the foot of God.  In any event, I would like to make it out to be the foot of the creator coming from the clouds to vanquish its squint-eyed and beaten foe.  "Triumphator" classically refers to the triumphal parades in ancient Rome, and I guess that this foot could belong to any victor, but since it is after all coming from the sky, I'd like to give that foot to God. 

Notes:

Pare’s Opera is available in toto at the National Library of Medicine’s superb pages here.

Ueber-Spectacular Understatement Dept.: the Happy Post-Apocalyptic America and the "Awakwardness" of Holocaust, 1962

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Self- and purposefully-deceptive belief in spectacular and unsupportable scenarios espoused by governmental leaders which affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people deserve their own Dante-esque categorization:  and that’s one that I haven’t come up with yet.   This post is one of a continuing thread on the history of atomic weapons.

I wonder how it was that we humans didn’t blow ourselves into melty dissolving bits during the Cold War.  Somehow all of those thousands of megatons of disastrously radioactive explosives that were completely and reliably deliverable didn’t get launched—not even by accident, not even during all of those hot itchy-finger DEFCON 2 situations.  Did MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction ) actually work?  Did the attempt at making a winnable nuclear confrontation keep people from actually trying to do so?  Did the overwhelming and insane buildup of weaponry actually have so much enormous and foul intellectual weight that no one could actually make the decision to use the weapons for fear of snuffing out all human life? 

Here’s an embarrassingly shining case in point:  Dr. Joseph D. Coker’s paper to the Population Association of America representing the thinking of the Office of Emergency Planning and the Executive Branch in general, which freely discussed the survivability of the United States following even a post-massive nuclear exchange. Dr. Coker was the director of the National Resource Evaluation Center, which tried mightily to figure out how/where /what/how the essential 'stuff” of America could be saved/stored/allocated after the end of the world.  Actually, Dr. Coker said that the big attack wouldn’t be the end of the world, so we needed to plan for surviving.

 A few cases in point, some of which, I must warn you, are breathtaking and Strangelovian in their myopia: 

Since Dr. Coker was addressing the Population Studies people, he related much of what he had to say (regarding national resources) to the American people.  He found that millions of people could be saved if they built a blast shelter (not a fallout shelter) that was covered with mounds of heavy material and outfitted for an extended stay of two to 22 days.  The unfortunate part of this scenario, Coker says, is that these shelters work best when 10 miles or more away from a detonation zone.  And since these zones were all over the country targeted by thousands of warheads, very few people (especially in cities) would be outside the 10-mile ring, which made the blast shelter basically useless. 

 

Coker notes that if an attack of 1000 megatons [a limited exchange] was aimed exclusively at U.S.air bases, “total fatalities will approximate 10% of the U.S. population”.  If this attack was aimed at population centers rather than the air bases, it would kill 40% of the population. A 5,000 megaton attack on air bases would produce 50% overall fatalities in the U.S.; if that amount was centered on large populations, the number would jump to 80% of the population.  10,000 megatons would yield 75% and 95%, respectively.  “A 50,000 megaton attack would kill almost all U.S. citizens under either targeting assumption”.  These figures didn’t include radiation deaths.

A big variable here not controlled for was the distribution of population at the time of attack.  The numbers that were used were compiled by the census and counted folks who would be at home.  So, the numbers above worked if and only if the Soviets attacked after dinner when everyone was at home for the night.  Since it would make sense to attack when people were at work at their industry or job or whatever during the day—thus maximizing the effect of the bomb—the casualties would actually be higher.

And what does that mean?  Dr. Coker relates this gem (on page 21): “The post-attack labor force available thirty days after the attack probably will represent a significantly lower fraction of the population than does the preattack labor force….” And this: “A nuclear attack can be expected to alter the occupational composition of the labor force.” 

This sort of thinking overtakes the factual aspects of massive attack, with Coker stating on page 24 “I wish to say  emphatically that it [post-attack America] will not be anything like that depicted in Neville Shute’s On the Beach.  It will be bad enough, but not that hopeless.”

 

And this absolutely incredible/horrendous and perhaps worst-use-ever of the word “awkward”:

 

 

For the love of King Neptune’s Pants:  Awkward?  How in the name of _______ could someone in such a high position and authority relate massive attacks on every major American population center which would cover the area in fire and thousands of gigantic highly radioactive craters in which a city used to exist be called “awkward”?  How great a sin was this, to influence opinion on holocaust via pathetic and unreasonable means?

And then this, on the survivability of our governmental and economic institutions:

“The post attack institutional environment will depend on the continuity, resourcefulness and general effectiveness of our leadership and the survival and resilience of pre-attack institutions…”

Hm?  The post-attack institutions will depend on themselves?

This of course is followed by a major plug for Dr. Coker’s own work, because the preparations undertaken by the NREC will directly affect the survivability of post-attack America.  So don’t stop the funding.  “The more complete and realistic our preattack [sic] planning and preparations have been and the more effectively the government is at all levels in inspiring and retaining the confidence and support of the population, the less drastic institutional changes will be.”  So it is the mealy aspect of inspiration that will direct the survivability of whatever it is that makes America so. 

I should point out that Coker’s use of “post attack” and “pre attack” appear as two words, one word and a hyphenated word, depending on nothing. This is only a forty-page document.

Another nugget on the post-Armageddon future on the distribution of wealth, mostly hinging on blast shelters:  “Per capita wealth in material terms may or may not be reduced by attack.”  There will be a relatively proportional number of  people who emerge from the smoking holes to staff surviving industry, and so per capita wealth will stay about the same.   If, on the other hand, people build more blast shelters, then the proportion of surviving workers to factories will increase, and “the surviving plant capacity will be spread more thinly among them”. It is left unstated, but what that means is that more successful implementation of blast shelters would mean a reduction in per capita wealth. Dr. Coker also forgets what he said earlier that the blast shelters really didn’t work unless they were more than ten miles from a target.  Considering that the industrial workers would be living close to, um, industry, they will no doubt be (in 1962) in a ten-mile radius to where the blast would be.  Then of course there would probably be more than one bomb, so the blast area would be more than a ten-mile circle, and so on and so forth.

 

In the following paragraph, Dr. Coker somehow draws all manner of feel-good high-probables around him, encasing himself like a sandman in a thin layer of improbability, to come to the following conclusion:

“…few of the analysts who have studied carefully these post-attack [sic] survival and recovery problems take any stock in the oft-repeated theory that the survivors will envy the dead.  On the contrary, after a very rough year or two, the surviving population, if it so chooses, can begin to enjoy the advantages of a social structure and a physical environment not so very different from those which prevailed before the attack.” [Emphasis mine.]

This is an astonishing work of incredible deceit, and may be the worst quote of the lot.  But it is so difficult to choose between unacceptable bits of thinking like this, raking out the horrible from the terrible.

Here’s another deceit that was absolutely better understood in 1962 than the writer acknowledges:  “The long-term effects of radiation are subject to much less understanding and certainty than are the short term effects.  There is some evidence that increased radiation exposure results in reduced life expectancy and increased evidence of leukemia and various degenerative diseases…”  And this:  “Genetic effects are more controversial.”  Than what?! And this: “Studies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience are said thus far to be inconclusive.”  Honestly this was very well understood in 1962, and statements like these were enormously irresponsible if the data were actually misunderstood and criminal if they weren’t.

There are many more examples—I’d say actually that the entire paper was at the level of Apocalypse Fairy Tale—but I’d like to close with just one more, this one using another fanciful version of the possible post-nuclear future and another highly insulting euphemism.  On transportation:  “We hope in the near future to develop a family of network and transportation models to estimate capabilities to move surpluses into deficit areas in order to cover deficits during each time period and to support the use of more ambitious resource management techniques focussed [sic] on recovery problems.”  Aside from bad sentence structure and misspellings I could hardly imagine sitting through a presentation where a person thought this stolen undercooked tripe.  What we have arrived at here at the end of the paper is references to smoke-in-a-hole cities being “deficit areas”, and the successful removal of human consideration from the conversation—strange as Dr. Coker was addressing the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America.  (I’d love to know what the association members thought of the talk afterwards.)

And so what can we draw from the experience of knowing thinking like this?  Is it as sterile as it might seem, so distant from our experience?  The scenarios have changed, as have the leaders and delivery systems, but the insatiable stupidities have evolved and morphed  into our own time.  Its easy to raise our eyebrows now on the whole MAD approach and the writings of people like Dr. Coker.  The truth of the matter is that we have plenty of this sort of thinking going on right now, big head-waggers that will loom in our futures with the attached questions of “how could this have happened?”.  WMD is one of the many examples of this, a Big Lie that was repeated for years and which ultimately cost the lives of many thousands of people and a great perpetuator of the culture of fear.  President Bush drove that one into the ground and so far as I know still employs it when necessary, threatening listeners with fear of those three letters like they were a practice hand grenade.  (I recall that a far-right radio personality  filled with afterbirth blood and urine eyes said that he would resign his show “in a year” if WMD were not found in Iraq; that was five years ago, and of course he is still there, bloated and ponderous and mostly violently wrong as ever.)  The Savings and Loan debacle.  The deathly ambitious practices leading to our recent depression.  The billion malnourished and desperate children in the world.  And so on. The point is that there is no paucity of thinking displayed by Dr. Coker in the past, and there is definitely no lack of it right at this very moment.  The problem is seeing it for what it is in the present and to not have to wait for the future to get to the truth of the matter.

[And how can I end this discussion without a bit more of Stanley Kubrick's magnificent Dr. Strangelove.., who pointed out these absurdities better than,perhaps, anyone?]

 

Ah, don't fret! The ending is just below (and just when you are about to laugh ("Mein Fuhrer, I can WALK" the other and last shoe drops.).

Found 17th Century Dadaist Art

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

The Scarcity of Divine Interactions in the History of Human Epidemics: Valley of Mexico

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Images of sacred interventions stopping the spread of disease is puzzling, as in this powerful and disturbing vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe appearing above the city of Mexico in 1737¹.  Mexico City was in the second year of a devastating cholera epidemic where 40,000 had perished in that city alone.

I wonder why Heavenly intercession didn’t come earlier?  Of course the people of the Valley of Central Mexico could’ve used some heaven-sent strong-armed virtuosity many times over the centuries.  In Mexico City during the Cockuliztli epidemic of 1576 the population of the non-Spanish (Native) population fell 50% in just a few years.  Over the period of 1545-1548 70% of the population of the city nearly died of hemorrhagic fever.  This epidemic was followed by many other (major) epidemics (1576-78, 1629-1631, 1736-1741, 1761, and so on) involving whooping cough, measles, typhus, smallpox , influenza, cholera, and of course famine. Cholera—like this epidemic in Mexico City—according to Rodolfo Acuna-Soto’s study² seems to have been the least of the epidemic worries in the Valley of Mexico over the last 500 years.  According to Robert McCaa’s study of population studies³, 11 authoritative studies on the decline in population in Mexico from 1519-1598 show an average and disasterous decrease of about 50%⁴.

So with the dozens of epidemics, the invasion of Europeans, and natural and unnatural famines, I would have expected to see more demonstrations of charity from above rather than this one skimpy display in the second year of a lower-echelon epidemic. 

1. From Caberra y Quintero Escudo de Armas de Mexico..., printed in Mexico in 1746.  There is much else of interest in this book--which is probably the best and most famous of the local histories of the city--besides the image that I fixated on. 

2. [Rodolfo Âcuna-Soto.]  Forum on Microbial Threats//Global Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events December 5, 2007 “The use of Historical data sets in Understanding Ecosystems Responses to Climate Change and the Importance of Long-term Monitoring Programs…” 

3. McCaa's study HERE

4. Table of colonial disaster 

Another Major Wrinkle in God’s Perfect Plan: Lots of Dots

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This installment of the continuing thread on the  history of dots questions the sublime machinery of the primum mobile in the work of Galileo, particularly in his The Siderreal Messenger (Sidereus nuncius) of 1610.   The reception of this extraordinary work was deep and profound, and the images of the “dots” were of extraordinary importance.

The perfection of the Creator’s plan was being shown to be not-so-perfect in the late Renaissance, a major chink showing up in the work of the dead Copernicus in 1543, which showed that the Earth was not the center of the great cosmological eye.  In the same year the body was also shown to be not so much built in god’s image with its bitter working revealed in one of the greatest anatomy books ever written, Vesalius’ revolutionary  De Humani Corporis Fabrica .  Problematic bits started showing up regularly wrapped in scientific proof:  the existence of a vacuum, thought to be impossible given the perfection of creation, was shown to exist in  Otto von Guericke's  Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio (Amsterdam, 1672).

 The stupendous idea of additions to the night sky, which had been thought to be immutable and unchanging, came into being with Tycho Brahe’s 1572 discovery of a new star (Nova) in Cassiopeia and added to in 1602 by Kepler’s announcement of another new star—both events showing that the night sky was not complete and that it was actually changing.

When you consider Galileo and his use of the newly-invented telescope it is usually a little far down on the list of accomplishments that his explosion of the night sky is considered.  In addition to everything he did (applying mathematics to the study of physics, understanding the physics of motion, developing the telescope and the microscope and other precision physical instruments and so on) Galileo pointed the not-yet-astronomically-used telescope to the sky and expanded the size of the universe by a factor of ten.  It was so utterly astonishing an idea I can hardly think how the not-prepared mind of 1610 would’ve reacted to the idea.  Certainly it was not a happy acknowledgment coming from the Holy Father, though a simple defense could’ve been that this miracle was divinely revealed ,and that it was there all of the time but just unknown to humans, and so not threatening the orthodoxy of Christian belief.  But that wasn’t the case, and Galileo would soon enough be in trouble with the church and its inquisition in short order.

The dots in this image are the dots of never-before-seen stars, part of an unobserved sky that was revealed only under magnification.  The size and scope of the new bigness of the universe was staggering, and of course opened the question immediately to the possibilities of yet a larger universe revealed under yet more magnification.  I don’t know the answer to this, and I wonder where Galileo might have publicly mused about how big the universe might actually be, and if he ever dreamed about the possibilities of telescopes that were 15 feet across rather than just two inches, and what those beasts might reveal.

*I’ve looked at the use of the telescope in the hands of Galileo before HERE (The Telescope in Galileo’s Hands: the Expansion of the Universe, 1610).

Gathering Information, 17th Century

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This image from Michael Lesy’s  wonderful Real Life, Louisville in the Twenties--a collection of interesting and naïve found photographs—has taken a life of its own.  It is probably a photo of a hosiery department (?) for a large clothing store taken during the great halcyon days of advanced hosiery as this is a very serious collection and display with what looks like waaay too many clerks to service god knows how many clients all buying hosiery at the same time.  Hosiery or not, whatever skinny thing it was in those flat boxes looks  as though whatever variety or size was needed by whatever verity or sized customer could be accessed in a minute or less, sending the customer on their way so that the next one buying unit could be serviced and dispensed, and so on into the night. 

But I prefer to think of the stuff in the boxes as letters, or words, or just plain old data:  sat for instance instead of this place being a clothing store it was a department store for writing, and this was the Poetry Section, selling words by the order, one word at a time.  Or perhaps the boxes held images.  Or entire ideas—just not entire, finished works. 

And why wouldn’t data and ideas have been stored and sold like this rather than hosiery or handkerchiefs?

This got me thinking a little about the storage and dispensing of information in antiquarian times, about how some of the writers of great and high-erudite works were actually able to accomplish their efforts. Deep into the early and future-vision-primitive history of online digital exploration, it is difficult to imagine producing works of sustained viability using combinations of only (private) libraries,  memory palaces¹, correspondence and notes.  Today the internet accounts for less than 1% of the time of advanced scholarship in all of  human history, but it has probably accounted for significant contributions to half of all the academic stuff that has ever been written--and we’re all probably terribly spoiled by the instant access to info in our datacentric existence.  

My own digital addiction in mind, I marvel at the accomplishments of people like Vincent Placcius (1642-1699), a vastly learned guy who sorted out 2,777 anonymous publications in 1500 pages, somehow, three hundred years ago.  He wrote a monumental bibliographical work 

 

 (Theatrum Anonymorum et Pseudonynorum²) with superb references, and did so with what we would today deem relatively nothing.  Placcius did have some sort chest-like devices with rods and pins and god knows what that functioned in a way I don’t understand as a note-keeping/comparing device.  I’ve included images of the device (below) in the hope that someone out there might recognize and explain it.  In any event, this superb piece of scholarship—the first of its kind—had to have taken a lifetime of reading and understanding and investigation to reveal.  The frontispiece to the book shows the author in  a library unmasking two anonymous authors, the masks of other conquests linked above him on a chord. 

Another example in the how-did-they-do-it category is Stanislaus Lubienitzky’s (1623-1675) Theatrum Cometicum…(1667), a powerhouse of data on all things cometary.  Lubienitzky recorded all manners of observations and reports of all comets ever recorded in extant chronicle or published work. Ever.  It is a vast and learned work of incredible determination.

NOTES:

1. See Frances Yates for the great standard on memory devices, The Art of Memory (1966).  And as long as we’re at it, her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1971) are also terrific works on a very high order. 

2.  Theatrum Anonymorum et Pseudonynorum2, Ex Symbolis & Collatione Virorum Per Europam Doctissimorum Ad Celeberrrimorum, Post Syntagma Dudum Editum, Summa Beati Auctoris Cura Reclusum...1708

People Out of Place: Mailrooms and Traffic Islands, Military, 1918

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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 are not 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?

 

                            

On the other end of the spectrum is this bizarrely-titled photo of a British soldier "guiding" a traffic signal device...the description says that this is the busiest intersection in all of British-occupied France.  Maybe so, but not at this particular time.  Perhaps the photographer should've waited a bit to get a different sort of picture to make his point, rather than settle for this lonely (if not beautifully arranged) situation.

                                                                                                            

Here's the image without the accompanying text, which was supplied for the end-user of the photo by the news service photography supplier. 

 

“Lesser Light Rules the Night…”—an Early Picture of Multiple Universes?

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Blank and Empty Things #56

This sort-of famous image, found in a French Bible Mortalisee made in Reims in the 13^th century,

displays The Creator measuring its creation, a sphere of the universe containing all of the stuff of creation, and including the Earth (pictured at upper right).  At least that is what I think this is—Creator stepping into the frame (its right foot outside the drawn border of the image), holding everything that it has made, and holding it all in the midst of another environment of some sort.  What that place might actually be, I don’t know.  Is that the space in-between the light created on the fourth day (pictured below from Schedel’s so-called Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493), the space that wasn’t the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night?  In this spirit it was the stars that were supposed to separate these two lights, but the stars themselves in many of the concentric circle cosmologies weren’t part of the Heavenly sphere itself, which is what the Reim’s illustrations seems to say.  I suppose that it is all simply displayed somewhere in the OT, but from where I sit right now, this looks like a painfully early Western image of multiple universes. 

The other thing is:  what is the Creator looking at?  It is definitely very focused and wide-eyed, and is lasered on something about half of the diameter of the universe to the right, just on the other side of the dividers. Is this the biggest of the Blank and Empty Things that can be imagined? 

Curious, Secretive, Sacred Irish Independence Political Icons (?)

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"Malone. … My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black ’47. Maybe you heard of it?
Violet. The Famine!
Malone (with smouldering passion) No, the Starvation. When a country is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. Me father was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in me mother’s arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland . …" --George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

 

 

"The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight but the English created the famine...a million and half men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by the English government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance which their own hands created."--John Mitchel (1815-1875), Irish Nationalist (and listed as a "martyr" in one of these badges/stamps)

I'm sorry to say that I do not know the origin of these diminutive, powerful emblems, and that what follows is all guess-work. They are only about a half-inch square or so, but they hold very powerful meanings in their messages.  I imagine that they were political messages to be worn, or posted in the mail, or used in subversive ways--because their messages were enormously subversive, taking on the occupying power of Great Britain at a time of supreme and enforced deprivation, an occupied people fighting against a spectacularly-better equipped foe.  The messages related to the Great Famine of 1847-1849, when the potato crops failed for three consecutive seasons , initiating a chain of events that caused the deaths of perhaps two million people, or 20% of the entire population of Ireland.  People didn't starve so much as they did die of associative diseases related to the process of starving to death, al of which it seems could have been addressed by some sort of effort by the British government.  It does seem to me as though the people of Ireland were left to flounder and drown.  The stories of the extreme deprivation are horrible:  starving dogs digging up the bodies of the recently unguarded dead, rats attacking the dying for food, and so on.  Terrible, miserable stories coming from what is probably the worst of period of starvation in European history.  the scene has been duplicated numerous times in this century killing hundreds of millions of people:: in Soviet Stalin's filthy anti-human pogroms, under the equally filthy Maoist adventures in production and nationalist strength in China, in Biafra, in Darfur, and on and on in our frailly stupid political existence here on Earth.

The small badges have always seemed somewhat sacred to me; there's just such a feeling of hope and inspiration and overwhelming empathy in them.  

 

 

Visual Display of Quantitative Data: Solomon Islands Battle Results

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I'm always ready to see different and interesting methods of displaying quantitative data, and this work--published in LIFE magazine in 1942--certainly fits that category.  That the ship losses are printed in reverse--white on black--is unusual in itself, but the design is just particularly good, fitting a lot of data on a single sheet of paper.  The image dramatically displays some very good (and very welcomed) news for the American public as the campaign for the Pacific dug in.  This was a major Allied victory in November 1942, and one of the pieces of the end for a campaign that stretched itself out over three years. 

--Solomon Island WWII battle chronology found HERE.

--General history of the Solomons campaigns HERE.                                                                                                           

Detail of the above: