JF Ptak Science Books

Three Great First F’s: Forks, Forts, Fission, (and one plain non-first F (Nobel))

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1645

 Apropos of nothing whatsoever, I’d like to look at four “first” F’s.  the first is the first known published image of a fork , or forcina in Italian.  This was a prickish utensil (seen in the image at the bottom-right), hiding none of its stabbing qualities with a middle tine, and shows for us all its direct decent from Mother Knife.  It appears in the Opera dell'arte del cucinare by the great Renaissance chef  and cook to Pope Pius V Bartolomeo Scappi (c. 1500 – 13 April 1577, buried in the church of SS. Vincenzo ad Anastasio alla Regola, dedicated to cooks and bakers) was published in 1573.

In the book he lists approximately 1000 recipes of the Renaissance cuisine (some of which, for Renaissance salads, appear at bottom) includes many images of kitchenware, the fork being perhaps the most famous.  (I used to know the first time that a fork appeared in a painting--of the Last Supper of course, but I've forgotten, though it does come right on the heals of Scappi.)

The second unrelated but interesting first “F” is perhaps the first image of a modern, canon-proofed fort, by none other than Albrecht Durer.  This image appears in 1527 in his Etliche underricht zu bestestigung der Stat, Schloss und Flecken, and although his designs were impracticable (massive and massively expensive forts and fortified cities; pretty but very costly), there were certain elements of the work that were very useful—namely, the new face of some of te walls that he offered to the modern canons of the 1520’s.  These weapons were vast improvements over their earlier brethren, and Durer responded to the extra and more accurate firepower by lowering and thickening the walls and giving them greater slope—this would aid in deflecting many of the shots that were not directly spot-on, and also would improve the chances of the fort’s survival against those hits by having thicker walls. 

The third F is slightly related to Durer’s fort walls—this is the first appearance of the word “fission”.  It appeared as so many of these sorts of 20th century announcements appeared with great sotto voce--this one, in a “Letter to the Editor” of the journal Nature (11 February 1939), by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch.

The communication, “Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons:  a New Type of Nuclear Reaction”  wasn’t a letter to the editor in the conventional sense of course but was meant to be the quickest line of communication of an important result and thus appeared somewhat truncated though the great stuff of the announcement was made known and understood.     Niels Bohr’s “The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission” in the Physical Review (1 September 1939) may I think be the first use of “fission” in the title of a paper.) 

There is a very big story here with Meitner and fission and Nazis and the Nobel.  This leads to our fourth F:  and that would be “F” as in “Failure” to the Nobel committee who in 1944 awarded the Nobel Prize to (German, non-Jewish) Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission while completely ignoring (purposefully, I would say) Meitner, who really, by all  rights, should’ve gotten the award, and probably by herself.  This is a more complex tale than I would care to deal with now, but I think that it is beyond doubt that the Nobel committee again (think Einstein and others) severely screwed this up in favor of maintaining their dislike for people with Meitner’s heritage.  (And yes, she was Jewish; Einstein suffered too at the hands of the committee, not receiving his award, unbelievably, until 1921, *16 years* following what was probably the best single year  that anyone ever had in the history of physics, ever, and then 14 years following his great year of 1907 and five years following 1916’s paper.  And so on.)   Yes, Meitner hung on in a not-good way in Germany for six bad years 1933-1938) until she finally get the hell out, but that really doesn’t tell the story very much.  The fission bit with Hahn and Strassmann is a little bedeviling, but it really was Meitner who recognized the whole thing as being the process of fission.  Period.  And shame again on the Nobel people for getting it wrong, again, on purpose. 

 

On Describing the Jobs of the Working Poor, Part 2: Friedrich Engels on Miners in England, 1845

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post  (An addition to the post on George Orwell and his descriptions of the working poor miners of England.)

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) traveled to England to work for the English subsidiary of his family's textile business, settling  into Manchester (and Salford)  in with a keen and ravenous eye.  He didn't have the eloquence of a George Orwell, but he had more than enough to capture the essence of what he saw and to see deeply into what he suspected; and what he saw of course was not very pretty so far as the condition of the working poor was concerned. 

 

So when he was in his early twenties, Engels researched and wrote about what he saw in the Industrial Revolution in the great smoking city of Manchester, grown from a city of 79,000 in 1811 to nearly 300,000 in forty years, seeing for himself the class struggles that he (and his new friend Karl Marx) would write about in Das Capital just four years later. What came of his work in Manchester was The Condition of the Working Class in England.  Dedicated to the people of England, it would not be available in English for another 43 years (at which point the "in 1844" was added to the end of the book's title). [The images above and below of Manchester show the city ca. 1840, when the life expectancy was around 30.] He probably would have been very surprised to see that  the revolution he wrote about didn't take place in England; and doubly so to see that the home of the revolution was Russia. 

Working Conditions is seen as one of Engels' greatest achievements, both for his insight and reporting and of course for what the work would contribute to Capital.  [The full text is found here.]

He writes:

"But these are not all the evils which descend upon the head of the coal-miner. In the whole British Empire there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as in this one. The coal-mine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie. The hydrocarbon gas which develops so freely in these mines, forms, when combined with atmospheric air, an explosive which takes fire upon coming into contact with a flame, and kills every one within its reach..."

Crowd Series--VE Day, May 1945

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This is an addition to a developing series on images of crowds:

• Ephemeral Uniqueness in Large Crowds, here.
• Crowds and the Press of Humanity:  WWI German POWs, here.
• The Chaos of Hats, here.
• Crowd Series and Berlin Expectations, here
• Clarity and Confusion in the Display of Human Masses, here
• Large Crowds and Singular Persons Series--3 Images.  Here.
• Servicemen and B-17s at the End of WWII, here.
• Imaging Mass Casualties in WWI, here.
• Relief in Capture: Churchill in Carthage and what 230,000 POWs Looks Like, here.
• The Detail is in the Detail: What 20,000 Soldiers and 1 Mule Look Like, 1918, here.

Times Square, New York City, VE Day, May 1945:

First Printed Views of America: Columbus in Print in 1493

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 Christopher Columbus was born in 1451, and born sometime over a three-month period that no one seems to be able to button down.  He (known as Christophorus Columbus in Latin, and Cristoforo Colombo in Italian and Cristobal Colon in Spanish)  and in an audacious dash to shortcut European rivals in trade with the East became one of the first Europeans to explore the Americas.  In his first of four voyages to what would be called "the New World", he landed in the Bahama archipelago, and in time explored the Greater and Lesser Antilles, Central America, and the Caribbean coast of Venezula, claiming all for the Spanish Kingdom. 

The first images of his adventures appeared in Oceanica Classis, printed by Johann Bergmann de Olpe, in Basle, in 1493--the first, below, showing an imaginary view of the Island of Hispanola.  In the image of Insula Hyspania, below, we see Native peoples running from the approaching ship and long boat--they of course did not run far enough. (By the end of the 1620's, something like 75% of the indigenous population in contact with Europeans (or in contact with people in contact with them) were dead, mostly from epidemics and diseases and lesser illness for which they had no immune systems.)

Four (of the other eight, two of which were repeated)  images from this fantastic work can be seen below:

Television Field Trials, the Beginning of the "Networks", and the First T.V. Dinner (1936)

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The first broadcast images in the history of television transmission were revolutionary if not very interesting.  Beginning in 19028 the first experimental Radio Corporation of America (RCA, via the National Broadcasting Company, NBC, its broadcasting division) images were of Felix the Cat, and something that would be received with 60-line clarity on a two-inch display.  For the most part, the daily two-hour broadcasts consisted of Felix or test patterns, broadcast from NYC, until 1931.  

Image quality increased markedly by the 1932 field trials with the use of iconoscope cameras, which allowed for 240-line reception though still with very noticeable flickering. The 1934 trials were improved further to 343 lines and with some less amount of flicker. 

The First Personal Computer (?)--"Simon", 1950

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The first exposure of the American public in general to a "personal computer" may have been in this issue of the Scientific American for November 1950--an article called "Simple Simon" by Edmund Berkeley.  ( Berkeley also wrote a book called Giant Brains, which seems to me to be the first mass-consumption book--written in terns for the general public--on how the computer works, and the design of "how a machine will think".  Berkeley looks at the MIT Differential Analyzer #2, the Moore School ENIAC, Bell Labs' General-Purpose Relay Calculator, and the IBM Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator.) 

The Simon was a five-hole paper tape (which was its data entry and memory) 2-bit storage relay-based computer that could use numbers from 0 to 3.  It was extremely limited, but it worked, and it was real.  And affordable.  And a baseline for things to come.   [The original issue of the magazine can be found in our blog bookstore section, here.]

Berkeley introduced the idea for Simon in Giant Brains:

"We shall now consider how we can design a very simple machine that will think.. Let us call it Simon, because of its predecessor, Simple Simon... Simon is so simple and so small in fact that it could be built to fill up less space than a grocery-store box; about four cubic feet....It may seem that a simple model of a mechanical brain like Simon is of no great practical use. On the contrary, Simon has the same use in instruction as a set of simple chemical experiments has: to stimulate thinking and understanding, and to produce training and skill. A training course on mechanical brains could very well include the construction of a simple model mechanical brain, as an exercise..."--Edmund Berkeley, in Giant Brains, 1949, p. 22

In the Scientific American paper Berkeley introduced the machine and how it functioned; he also described three  three outcomes for Simon:

First: "Simon itself can grow.  It possess all the essentials of a mechanical brain..."

Second: "It is likely to stimulate the building of other small mechanical brains.  Perhaps the simplicity and relatively low cost of such machines may make them attractive to amateurs as the radio set and the small telescope."  [The "low cost" in 1951 was $600--equal to about $3000 today.]

Third:  "It may stimulate thought and discussion on the philosophical and social implications of machines that handle information..."

Berkeley finishes the three-page article with the following paragraph, looking into the not-too-distant future:

"Some day we may even have small computers in our homes, drawing their energy from electric-power lines like refrigerators or radios ... They may recall facts for us that we would have trouble remembering. They may calculate accounts and income taxes. Schoolboys with homework may seek their help. They may even run through and list combinations of possibilities that we need to consider in making important decisions. We may find the future full of mechanical brains working about us."

BERKELEY, E.C. (1950). Simple Simon in Scientific American, No. 183, November 1950, pp. 40-43.

Religion-in-the-Foxhole Division: God in Shelters, London 1940

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On looking at the bombing of Britain from the German side--an article in the popular Illustrirte Zeitung for 5 September 1940 with maps and illustrations, found here.

AS people took cover from bombs and fire in the subway system or in bomb shelters, proselytizers were on their way to work, too, as seen in this slip of a handout, Have You s Shelter?, published around February 1940.  It seems that the maker and distributor of this tiny pamphlet didn't identify themselves save for an address from which more copies of the flyer could be obtained (61 Upton Lane, Forest Gate, London)

People weren't quite yet getting into the shelters for real--this was still the pre-Blitz period, back there in February 1940, and the real attack against England (but particularly against London) didn't begin until September and last through May 1941, which in its course would kill 40,000 civilians (half of whom were in London) and destroy a million homes.  In February it was still speculation, and the church folk who distributed this flyer were out to make the best of it--trying to save souls, trying to ease the nervous burden through belief, trying to do something, anything. Though mostly it seems trying to convince people that it wasn't just German dive bombers that they needed to fear. 

The Call of the Book: Antoine Verard and Illustration, ca. 1500

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M. Verard was a very active bookseller, printer and publisher, operating in Paris between about 1485 and 1512.  He produced a catalog of his printed works that was very extensive, containing more than 100 works.  One of them, a Bible published in 1502, contained this spectacular woodcut, "The Root of all Evil", showing Adam and Eve at the crucial moment, a very considerable man-serpent completely engulfing the fruit tree, winning the confidence and trust of Eve.  And above it all grows the tree of humanity its roots firmly in place along the sphere of the fall of man.  

I also quite like the portrait of Verard, shown offering one of his books to King Charles VII, hoping for his approval:

Blank, Empty and Missing Things, #35: Empty Trees

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Continuing a longish thread on Blank, Empty and Missing Things is this very short notice on a beautiful illustration from (Rev.) William Buckland (1784-1756, Reader of Geology at Oxford) in his Geology and mineralogy : considered with reference to natural theology

I think it is a remarkable thing, a beautiful piece of explorative artwork when taken out of context.

The description of this engraving from volume I, page 466:

Buckland is well remembered for his analysis of the fossil remains found in Yorkshire's Kirkdale Cave, which he identified as hyena (and its prey) remains from earlier prehistoric times rather than having been swept from the tropics to England by the waters of the Great Flood.  Of course, Buckland himself held that opinions years earlier, along with many other geologists...as some actually hold today, somehow, in creationist fits of intentional delusion.¹

Notes

Darwin & Frankenstein--Mary Shelley on Creativity and the History of Her Idea

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1606

Today (September 9) in 1797 was the day of the death of  Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin), an English feminist and anarchist, best known for her tract  Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and also for being the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Shelley), the author of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.  In all likelihood, Ms. Godwin died after complications in the birth of her daughter, giving way to "childhood fever".

  The first time that Mary Shelley's name appears on her Frankenstein... is on the title page of the second edition of the work, when it was printed in France in 1831, thirteen years after the anonymous Parisian printing of the first edition.  My guess is that a woman's name--despite her high literary lineage--would just not fit on the title page of such an untoward, beastly book in which the monster of Frankenstein was created., and which was decidedly ungodly, a possible blasphemy.

But when the second edition was published, in addition to the other changes that she made to the book--substantial, meaningful changes that suggest to scholars that the real, or intentional, Frankenstein produced by Shelley remains in the first edition--there was included a very interesting introduction.  It is in this intro that Shelley shares her story of the creation of this unusual book, as well as the literary and scientific influences in creating it--a sort of intellectual heritage to the idea, an outline of the process of her creativity that led to Frankenstein.

The book is better known for the numerous movies that were very loosely based on it, and truth be told the book has a far greater depth to it than any of the movies ever remotely hoped to achieve--they were after unsettling horror, whereas the book was concerned with that plus the interplay of Romanticism and science/technology, and the understanding of the way in which life begins and how the brain acquires information. I think that was she was looking for was the essence of things out there somewhere in the empire¹ of man.

Shelley was influenced by a number of different scientists (though the term itself, "scientist", wouldn't be used for the first time until decades after the book was published) , some of whom wrote on the subject of Vitalism and other Romatic-era sensibilities rubbing up against the new technical revolution and objectivist capacities,  and the supposed capacity of electricity via Galvanism (and the work of Mesmer and Galvani) to restore life to the dead.  As Shelley writes in the introduction of the second edition: "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth". She wrote with accomplishment, a very nice prose, weaving a tale of Newtonian-Woodsworthian-Galvanism-Volatarianism, a Romantic-Scientist.

But the Darwin that Shelley refers to in 1831 is of course Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, and someone who I think Shelley didn't actually read, but had heard about. So I think that the influence of Darwin on Shelley came through bits of remembered pieces from Percy and Byron, and only suggestive of what Darwin was  writing about.  (Even the reference to Darwin in the 1831 introduction is not there--she refers to what Darwin was writing about in the section 'Spontaneous Vitality of Microscopic Animals' in the notes section of his The Temple of Nature, and doesn't really quite get that part right, though if what Darwin was writing about could be described as a chocolate milk shake, Shelley could indeed say that the drink was chocolatey.

The book is really quite an achievement, especially given its time; and the intro to the second edition is an unexpected revelation into how someone comes up with an idea.  A big idea. 

The other influence in he writing of Frankenstein...--much of the book was conceived while Shelley was pregnant, a pregnancy which ended in a miscarriage and which almost cost Shelley her life. (Shelley gave birth to four children, only one of whom lived into maturity.)  The book also came a few years after two suicides in her family.  Life. Regeneration. Birth. Creation.

Notes:

Francis Bacon would tell us that

But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.  Francis Bacon, 1620  Aphorism 129,' Novum Organum ("The New Organon, or True Directions COncerning the Interpretation of Nature), Book I (1620

 

John Stuart Mill and the Early De-gendering of the Subject--Inventing "Person-kind"

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"That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes — the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other."--On the Subjugation of Women, John Stuart Mill, 1861.

Perhaps one of the most devastating logical displays in the history of the struggle for equality for women was that of John Stuart Mill.  He makes a powerful and inescapable argument on what he considered the basic enslavement of women in his The Subjugation of Women in 1861--that, and of course a complementary argument for the recognition of women as moral/ethical/legal equals of men.

If Mill was the doctor of the state of England, he would have said that his patient was suffering a necrosis, that women as slaves would be the eventual death of the United Kingdom, and that equal freedoms and individual rights needed to be granted to them to ensure the survival of the state.  Women needed to be added to the equality register so far as the law was concerned, to be equal beneficiaries of everything that society had to offer.  and that equality extended to the family unit, where the married partners would share the domestic scene, and that the husband would live more of his social life within the family rather than without, changing the basic structure of the family for the better.  It was to this political end that as a Member of Parliament Mill--on 20 March  1867--introduced the idea of female suffrage to the House of Commons as a stipulation to the Representation of the People Bill, which would lead to the Reform Bill of 1867.  Mill suggested changing the word "man" to "person". It was not a success, of coure, and women would not get the vote for another 50 years. 

Punch, or the London Charivari, the leading satirical and social-commentating periodical of Great Britain, took a relatively neutral position on Mill a week later (30 March 1867) with a full-page cartoon (above).  Mill is daintily bu8t forcefully trying to clear a path for the women at his right hand, trying to open a way through a crowd of men being anchored by John Bull.  I'm no authority on any of these matters, but it seems to me that if Punch had decided to take a hard line against the vote for women they might've made the group of women depicted here more tawdry or "manish" or un-ladylike or something, anything, than the relatively benign group that was depicted. 

A few weeks later another cartoon appears (on 1 June 1867) with Mrs. (John) Bull greeting Mill with some level of amusement, this time the editors carrying more of a challenge to the whole idea.  Mrs. Bull  says "I  hadn't the slightest notion that we were such miserable creatures", with a good smile and crinkling eyes, looking down at the diminutive Mr. Mill, whose head is bowed and eyes downcast in defeat of the bill. 

I've not studied Punch but I have sat down with a few decades of it, and I've gotta say that I don't see very much there at all regarding the vote for women--and even here, when it does, twice, the rebuke--if any--for thinking such thoughts as Mill is surprisingly mild. 

Mill's closing paragraph of his Subjugation, summing up:

"When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification — first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being."

Apocalypse Then--World War III, The 36-Hour War of 1948

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1585  [Part of a long series on atomic and nuclear weapons]

This is also part of a sub-series on the invasion of attack on America; examples of other posts include: Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942 (which is the most-viewed post from this blog, with over 500k readers), The Invasion of America, 1935,  Bombing Manhattan and the Amerika Bomber, 1943, and The Invasion of America, 1942, Part II .

In the very near wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the editors of Life magazine published a prescient bit of propaganda on the coming of the Cold War.  I guess though that the Cold War had already begun by Yalta¹, when the sick and basically-terminal FDR seems to have been corralled by Bloody Joe Stalin, leaving the new President Truman on alert for the possible coming aggressiveness of the Soviet Union.  The article appeared in the 19 November 1945 issue (pp 28-39), and it was a longish one, with nine illustrations (by A. Leydenfrost), and as articles go in Life from this time, this one was heavy. 

It built itself up on a report generated from the offices of General Hap Arnold, and reckoned a new war, a New War, World War III, to occur in 1948--except that this time there were no natural difficulties that the U.S. could hide behind. (Arnold said: "...with present equipment an enemy air power can without warning, pass over all formerly visualized barriers and can deliver devastating blows at our population centers".) The threat would come from above, and there would be little accurate defenses against them. 

There would be survivors but massive destruction and death--and remember that this was at the point of the simple atomic weapon, before the development of the big stuff.  In the opening images of the article, a chilling two-pager showing eight major American cities being struck by atomic weapons, resulting in at least 10,000,000 casualties.

But as grisly as all of this was, the American reader was told the the United States would prevail, and that our rockets "would lay waste" to the enemy's cities; "the U.S. wins the atomic war".

[Image sources:  I've used the image from the Drexel University site as my copy of this issue of Life is in a massive half-yearly bound volume, impossible to scan.]

This is what New York City was supposed to look like, afterwards, with inspectors sizing up the radiological waste of what was left of the NYPL at 412nd Street:

 Notes:

1. The Yalta Conference was the third meeting between the leaders of the U.S., the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, held 4-11 February 1945.  It came after the Tehran and Cairo Conferences, and preceded the final Potsdam Conference on 17 July- 2August 1945.

More illustrations:

Present at the Creation--"Physics Today", 1948

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One of the real pleasures of being a bookseller is the discovery of the unexpected source--in this case it was a small group of papers that at one time belonged to David Katcher, who--among many other things--was the first editor of the American Institute of Physics' magazine, Physics Today.  It was started in 1948 to help bridge the gap between good science writ bad and hard science writ even worse for the world of the general reader. These are a few of the fragments from the editor's desk, as Katcher was organizing his thoughts about what the magazine would be about, who would write for it, and how the ideas would be presented. 

For example, this worksheet for the first issues of the magazine outlined articles by some of the heaviest names in physics, with "something" by Bush, Conant, Oppenheimer; as well as who would be the target audience ("all");  and who the contributors would be ('big name").  Quite a different world and pace, then, and one in which a forceful man like Katcher could do a lot in, and quickly. 

Then there's this interesting page of notes of a conversation between Katcher and the great I.I. Rabi, who offered some suggestions and insights about what might appear in the new magazine:

And this, Katcher's very clear statement on editorial policy (for 28 July 1948):

The Book of Accidents Designed for Young Children, 1831.

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The very Gorey-ish title of this book--seemingly designed to manufacture accidents for children--is actually a children's advocate book. Its a small book, a chapbook, made for small hands, produced on the cheap and meant to be consumed by children and adults alike, warning people of the commonplace dangers that called on children in the 1830's.  Scalding, being kicked by a horse, falling, being injured while playing with knives and candles and firearms, crossing the street, being tossed by a bull or wild horse, falling out of a coach, drowning, playing and throwing stones, tumbling down stairs and the like made a devastating impact on the lives of children--sometimes ending them, as the author points out.  By pointing out these dangers, and by having them read by (or to) children, the author believed that the lives of thousands of children could be saved.

[Image sources:  Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.]

The mission statement:

He was correct, of course; its a legendary problem trying to protect children from the obvious.

Prometheus Unbound; or, the Triumph of Science in Olympus (1879)

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The wonderful Punch, or the London Chiarivari strikes again for the year 1879.  The quick-browse is seldom complete, as I've witnessed again and again; 1879 revealed several fantastic images that were posed to this blog last week (here, for the Technology Museum of the Future and also here for Thomas Edison's Anti-Gravity Underwear and Kite Babies), and as it turns out just a few pages away, there existed a larger, two-page illustration that was again on the triumph of science, and which I missed completely, twice.

The message in this cartoon is the glory of "science", which was flying very high indeed in the newly-electrified times of 1879.  Dominating the image is Mr. Punch himself, holding the electrical sun in one hand, illuminating everything.  To his right, Mars and Heracles stand before an enormous cannon, with different reactions; Bacchus sits astride a barrel of coffee of all things with Pan enjoying a short cup of Joe, while in the lower left corner Hades himself is making a photograph of Eros (?), an hourglass slung across his back, finally coming to grips with capturing change.  In the right corner at bottom is a young man who is intent perhaps on reporting on the situation via a handy public telephone--such things didn't yet exist in 1879, the telephone being just three years old, but the artist thought enough of its future power to add it into this scene of the triumph of science and technology over the panoply of gods and demigods.

On the right ide of the image the gods make no further advance against science and technology.  Ares-as-workingman is puzzled by the giant Nasmyth hammer, with the Cyclops in the background a little more concerned, disbelieving what their eye told them.  Poseidon is shuttled away in the lower left, accompanied by what looks to be a weeping mermaid., hustled to the exit by a torpedo, a diver in a deep sea suit, and what I think is a special life-preserving inflatable suit.  In the middle of the image we see two women dressed in legal and academic garb, looking determined before a finicky Hermes; and above them, lording over it all, is a very dissatisfied Zeus, and a headache-y Hera.

Since the image is entitled "Prometheus Unbound, or Science in Olympus", I guess that Zeus must be reacting to electricity as the unbound Prometheus, a modern version of a kind power given to humankind via electricity.  It is this new Prometheus that is the undoing of the god's retreat.

Overall, this is a very plain Victorian view in the trust of science and technology to lead in all things, even the very basis of much of European mythology.   [I hope that I haven't abused the mythology too much.]