JF Ptak Science Books

The Height of Flight: London, 2026 Future Vision

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1867

Montague B. Black (b. 1884), an artist and illustrator, pulled the curtain back from the future back there in 1926 to what he thoiught might be the following scene of London in 2026:

A detail reveals an interesting airship:

The airship (of an undetermined power source) has an ad on the side of it reading "Overland Line, London-Sydney"--and by "overland" the artist is not thinking of the old-time "overland" as in prairie schooners and such, but quite literally "over the land".  We can also see an ad on the side of a building for an "Underground to Scotland, Glasgow 2hrs 45 mins".  There are also named buildings such as the London Bridge Air Depot and the Airtaxi Ltd.  The skyscrapers really aren't all that enormous--I see one or two perhaps in the background that might be a hundred stories or so, but the buildings in the foreground are definitely of modest expectation. 

There are however dozens of flying machines in the sky, though with the exception of the three large airships, a hundred years has not paid too many benefits to the other aircraft. 

Black did create an interesting poster for the White Star line, featuring a certain famous luxury liner--of course the man was just like anyone else, and could not see into the future for the Titanic, nor could he imagine slightly accelerated designs for aircraft.  He did manage to portray a transportation system that would be heavily dependent on air travel.  That said, he left plenty of room for speculation on the future of the Underground, as we can see in all of this future-glory that no matter the amount of accomplishments in the sky, trains would still be running underground.  Black got those two things right, at least. 

The Invasion of America (Part III)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1688

The New York City harbor looks pretty rough in this picture, tall whitecaps with surprising little reflected in what should be pretty choppy water, meaning that light should be reflecting everywhere, a difficult collection of reflected reflections. 

[Image source:  May 1917 issue of the uncommon magazine, Illustrated World.]

 The submarine, battleship  and zeppelin menaces were real, at least in Europe or in the Atlantic--the aeroplanes far less so¹.  But the applications of these fears directly to American shores were still very distant things, particularly when it came to an attack on New York City--except of course that the U.S. had just declared war against Germany, finally, just a few weeks before this issue was published.

The war began for real in Europe in August, 1914, so the fighting had been going on there in fratricidal earnestness for two and half years, costing millions and millions their lives and limbs.  America had been isolationist and non-interventionist up until this point, remaining sweatily on the sidelines, until the capture of the infamous Zimmerman telegram², which was a coded message sent from Germany (the German Empire) to Mexico (and taken by the Brits as it was sent, the crypto-boys of Room 40 breaking the thing) suggesting that Mexico join in a war against the U.S.  It hit the American press on 1 March, and the story exploded--literally. This is what the beginning of war looks like, sometimes:

So perhaps there was some amount of yellow journalism involved here, and some inflationary propaganda as well, and some good-old profit-taking on a half-sci-fi story--on the other hand, the German Empire did just sink 800,000 gross tons of shipping during the 30 days of April (1917), so sub fears were in general real and palpable.  The issue of them sighting the Staten Island Ferry though was quite another matter. 

The first American soldiers would arrive for fighting in June.  The whole thing would be over in 17 months, which is well less than half of the time that the U.S. spent in WWII. 

The United States would suffer 116,000 military deaths during its part of the war--a small fraction of the overall military deaths (9 million) and a smaller part still of overall deaths including civilians (totaling 16 million).  There would be 205,000 American wounded in this conflict, a little less than 1% of all war military casualties. 

It would be interesting to see the coverage in England of the American invasion fears.

Notes:

1.  This was not so much a war of bombing than it was for air-to-air combat; bombing became more of a realm of aircraft in the suppression of indigenous populations by occupying powers in the 1920's, and then in Fascist Spain in the mid-1930's, and then graduating as it were in WWII. 

2..  The telegram was named for the Foreign Secretary of the German Empire, Arthur Zimmermann,, who sent the thing out on January 16, 1917.  President Wilson delivered his war address to Congress on 2 April 1917. 

A military death pie chart for the Entente Powers [source, Wiki]:

On the Invasion of America, Part I

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1687

See also: Invasion Routes to the U.S.  and this blog's most-viewed posting (with over 500k hits) Maps of the Invasion of America, 1942 . 

America has almost never been invaded. I should clean that statement up a bit: the United States has almost never been invaded.  America–which included North/Central/South once upon a time long in the dim past–was constantly invaded until the invasions no longer counted themselves as such, which I guess means that the “invasion” forces became  “resupply”. (Perhaps an invasion is over once you surpass a certain ratio of houses : forts.)

“Invasion” does not include “attacks”.  A few guys getting off a Nazi sub and wandering around until they got picked up (with some (all?) being executed) does not an invasion make.  9/11 was not an invasion, though the subsequent invention of impending and pervading fear was–that’s why we have “storm centers” rather than “weather reports” on broadcast news–but even that fear business was more home-grown than anything else.

The Japanese Army were on two small islands in the Aleutian chain (which may have been closer to Tokyo than NYC) for a bit in WWII–also does not make for an invasion, even if they were there for a long time.  Or even if they were still there.  Nor does sending hundreds or thousands of paper incendiary balloons across the Pacific an invasion make. 

UFOs don’t count, either.  (I still find it remarkable that such a large percentage of the hundreds of thousands of “sightings” has the UFO with landing or whatever lights on it. I figured out at one point that there has been a report on one of these critters every ____ minutes since Roswell. And in all of those hundreds of thousands or reports, if you took them all and stacked them one on top of the other, they would reach perhaps the height of a grain of sand.)  The Beatles don’t count, either.   

What also doesn’t count (but probably should) but which is not military–not really, though it may have the impact of a military force at some time in the future–are Chinese-made imports of, well, everything.   At Thanksgiving I wondered how much of a dinner could be composed of foods that were shipped from China and to no great amazement an almost-complete table of food could be set, plus napkins, flatware, plates, candles, tablecloths, tables, chairs, paper turkey decorations, carpet, flooring, wallpaper, paint for the walls and ceiling, screws for the Chinese-made door hinges, lighbulbs, tubes for the McIntosh preamps, all of the clothing worn by the guests, and so on.  The electricity is still American-made. The fact that Mott’s Apple Juice is coming from Chinese apples is a bad sniff of the future. The country of origin is usually on juice bottle necks-check it out.)  

Certainly something that does count is the invasion by Great Britain of the United States in the War of 1812--they invaded long and deep enough to burn the White House and cause general havoc.  We won that one.  But of course the Brits were otherwise involved on the Continent.

Perhaps this non-invaded bit explains why the most-viewed post on this blog (with at last 500,000 views, 340k alone coming from the post being carried by IO9.com) was a LIFE magazine article from 1942 on the possible invasion routes to the U.S.  Maybe the volume was driven by war-gamers, though I suspect it was made up largely of the curious who weren’t used to seeing “Invasion of” and “America” together in a military sense.

 

(An another set of maps from Fortune magazine for September 1935, a predecessor to the above,  and from my post here):

But now for the  real stuff:  a map of the 54 invasions of Great Britain (and "the places at which foreign troops have landed on British soil since 1066 (and all that), seen in the Illustrated London News for 27 March 1909):

And then this, where the WWII invasion routes were turned around: 

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..

And so, there it is--a presentation of several maps showing invasions, real and imagined 

History of Fear: the Lure of High Sci-Fi Sexual Danger

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   [Part of a new series on the History of Fear]

There just seemed to be something going on with women and clothing and sex and fear and sci-fi trouble, or at least so on the covers of a spectrum of pulp publishers in the 1930's-1950's.  Perhaps this had nothing more to do with anything than having a pretty woman posing next to the UNIVAC II in a 1959 issue of Computers and Automation. In any event, I stockpiled some of these images and collected them under the Fear-Sex heading, and for right now all I'm going to do is pass them along. 

Are they really sexualizing danger? I have no idea what the content was of these issues, but from the looks of things, I'd throw hazard to the wind and say "yes", at least to the visual aspect. 

(Don't forget to have a peek at an earlier post on Women in Sci-Fi Past-Future Distresses, here.)

History of Fear: Not-so-Scary Scariness--Science Fiction Pulp Covers, 1930's-1950's

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1680   Part of a new series on the History of Fear

Perhaps you become scared of what is taught you or is available to you, or made available, or dreampt.  Perhaps you can dream not-so-terrible things unless you have been exposed to them in one form or another, already.  I can certainly recall from my childhood things that made me feel fear, and they weren't very fearful--not really--at all, though they were at the time, because there was no way for me to process the weird adaptations to my imagination.

Certain things are taught to children as a matter of course, I guess, certain fearful things, like for example the oldish child's prayer ruminating on a sleeping death, or some exacerbating tale from the brothers Grimm--how else are children to come up with the ideas of not waking up or being boiled alive or eaten by a witch?  

And so I wonder about the fear factor imaged and implied in these early wonder/sci-fi magazines, meant for distribution to high-adolescents and adults.  They simply do not look so terrifying, though I guess it is because the true business end of FearSell USA Inc had not yet been prioritized in the national economy--and certainly it was orders of magnitude away from approaching anything that we have today.  Even the constant state of storm/terror available to us in a relentless flow from a simple avenue like The Weather Channel must be a testament to the dept of our fear depravity. 

The stories--or the ideas of the stories, anyway--seem scarier to me now than the images of them on the covers of these magazines.  It would be an interesting thing to make a timeline of fearful images to see how these things changed over the decades. Or centuries.

Cashing out Corpses: the Value of (Human) Dead as Fertilizer, 1874

JF Ptak Science Books Post 303

"Nature's object remains unstated" for us humans, writes Sir Henry Thompson (1820-1904, polymathic professor of clinical surgery, University College, London)  in the March 1874 issue of Appleton's Popular Science Monthly, or at least so in life.   In his article "Disposal of the Dead", Sir Henry finds at least an answer in death for Nature's purpose for people:  fertilizer.  After birth, the process of decay is constant, until we all find ourselves broken down to our chemical and mineral elements in an nearly endless series of breakdown, failure and shortages until our cells decide to stop working.   (Folks who wish for an eternal life should be careful:  Tithonus, a mortal Trojan in love with Eros suffered from her wish to Zeus--the goddess of the dawn asked for Tithonius to be immortal just as she, but did not ask for him to stay the same age, which is very problematic.  Just like in the story of the Struldbruggs, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver found a people who were immortal but who also aged as time went by--they became more rickety and feeble and disabled and so on, right up to the point where they couldn't even read anymore because their fingers were too brittle for page-turning and their minds so weak that they forgot the beginning of a sentence before they came to its end, which means I guess they didn't need to turn pages anymore, because the same page was fresh to them, tirelessly and endlessly.  Gulliver says that "no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure from such a life". Amen. )

Full text via wikisource:  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_4/March_1874/Disposal_of_the_Dead

We do not have the problems of Tithonius and the Strudbruggs. decaying daily in our sprint to the Finish line (preferable to the "End", as "Finish" implies that something has actually been done). 

Dr. Thompson works out his inexorable logic of the most effective way of disposing of the dead with some noirsh dead-pan humor.  He has a number of gems like "what is best to be done with the dead is then mainly a question for the living" sprinkled throughout this pretty mordant paper.  What it all boils down to for Thompson is some rock-solid reasoning: humans have something to give back to the earth once they die in the forms of chemicals and nutrients. But this gift  he says is needlessly strangled by our funerary practices  (or at least Western funeral practices):  embalming the dead  and offsetting their decomposition and then enclosing them in wood and metal six feet down in the ground defeats the whole sense of fulfillment in death.  Nothing could be worse (a "useless pollutant").  Not only that, the economic waste is a staggering fraud, Thompson computing that a million pounds are lost every year to the practice in London alone. 

There are ways of doing this better, he argues, the result of "this question of vital economy to the country" would be like burying a million pounds a year "into the bosom of Mother Earth, who could give it back in huge returns at compound interest for the deposit". He figures that it takes but a few hours of high heat in a furnace to reduce dead people into something "useful" that can be gathered in the furnace's cauldron and distributed where needed.   150 pounds of wood (or about a pound per deadweight) would do the job of gaining the fertilizer, which would be not only far cheaper than burial (costing less than a pound sterling) but would reduce the cost of importing fertilizer from other countries.

He writes:  "the necessary complement of this ceaseless waste of commodity most precious to organic life, and which must be replaced, or the population could not exist, is the purchase by this country of that =same material from other countries less populous than our own, and which can, therefore, at present spare it."  (I'm pretty sure he's talking about non-human fertilizer.  I think.)

Thompson continues his argument that cremation is actually much more agreeable process than the current attempts at salvaging dignity in the dead.  The principle complaint against cremation (in a practice of the veneration of the dead that was thousands of years old) was, he says, "sentiment".  But he says that this same sentiment has nothing to urge in seen kindnesses in the present practices, and says that he would take a look at what that "pleasant process" actually looked like.  "So far as I dare!  For could I paint, in its true colors, the ghastly picture of what happens to mortal remains of the dearest we have lost, the page would be too deeply stained for publication".  The beauty of death ("she lay beautiful in death") so squeezed of life by flower Victorian poets lasts, oh, not so long.  Thompson doesn't pursue in writing what he couldn't do with paint, only to say that the process and the result "of Nature so ruthlessly and rapidly blight(ing) her own handiwork in furtherance of her own grand purpose" was revolting, and if that part was acknowledged, the sentimental grievances against his own proposal should slip away.
This was all well and good, and an excellent argument, but it was hardly a topic for table talk in London at nearly the height of the Empire, nor is it today.  People simply weren't ready for burning up poor old Auntie Em  and sprinkling her in the garden, 10 inches down.  I do admire his argument and presentation, though.  His general arguments though were much toned down from this, and as the organizer and first president of the Cremation Society of Great Britain he sought the use of cremation for economy and hygiene more so than anything else.  It was still a hard go.

Note: 

A short outline of Western writing on cremation, from the History of the Cremation Society of Great Brtain website:

"The first re-emergence of interest in cremation in modern times was in 1658 in an essay Hydriotaphia: Urn Burial, by Sir Thomas Browne, a physician from Norwich, but it was in 1664 in a book entitled Philosophical Discourses of the Virtuosi of France that it was first advocated as an alternative to burial. During the next two centuries numerous other discussions on this question took place but the grand revival of the subject really occurred in 1869 when it was presented to the Medical International Congress of Florence by Professors Coletti and Castiglioni "in the name of public health and civilization". 1872 saw more papers advocating cremation, the most important being that of Dr. Polli, as it contained results of the first experimental researches. The following year Professor Gorini of Lodi and Professor Brunetti of Padua also published reports or practical work they had conducted. A model of Professor Brunetti's cremating apparatus, together with the resulting ashes, was exhibited at the Vienna Exposition in 1873 and attracted great attention, including that of Sir Henry Thompson, Bart., F.R.C.S., Surgeon to Queen Victoria, who returned home to become the first and chief promoter of cremation in England."