JF Ptak Science Books

Triumphantly Unusual Images of the Eiffel Tower

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 732  Blog Bookstore

This image of the building of the foundation of the Eiffel Tower, which appeared in the Scientific American in 1888, appears both orderly and chaotic, a dizzy miasma of activity and a confusion of right angles.  (My six-year-old Tess says that it looks “worky”.)  Part of the issue is the fine quality of the jumble, with 90-degree angles everywhere, which confuses the eye.  Another part is the perspective, which is odd in places, and which takes the whole of it and makes the print into a near Escher-like experience of impossibility.  IT is this spatial confusion which makes this print so uncomfortable to me. For instance it seems that the observer’s point of view may be in several different positions, depending

on where you resolve to fix our eye: if you choose the worker’s shed in the upper left corner as a reference point, the height of you viewpoint will be different than if you used, say the first pointing man in the foreground as reference.  Also that pointing man sands next to a little rail track that seems to hoist itself into the air before disappearing.  There’s much else, but these examples will do for present.

These other images are the first nail & Eiffel Tower images I've ever seen.  The explanation is simple enough, though I think I'd much rather not know. 

This image and data is from the generally useful data and interesting if not useless info Scientific American Reference Book. A Manual for the Office, Household and Shop, by Albert A. Hopkins, and published in 1903. It gloriously depicts the annual American finish nail production in terms of Eiffel Towers:  there were evidently 10-million 100-pound kegs of these nails made in 1902; if they were made into one big nail, it would be this one--52' in diameter and 1000 feet tall.  I guess another useful visual bit would be the representation of the number of new houses built/kegs of nails, which would make this image a little more meaningful; though, perhaps, we may not be going for meaning, here, necessarily.

 

 

Telegraph “Fax”, 1895. Transmitting Images by Wire & 120-Year-Old Emoticons

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 701     Blog Bookstore

This Scientific American article on the smart/odd/analog transmission of pictures via telegraph (14 September 1895) by W.H. Lowd, can make you say “ohhh, of course” out loud.  Mr. Lowd’s insight came fifty years after the Morse telegraph came into being, thirty years after it becomes the greatest means of communication, twenty after the first multiplex telegraph, and in the same year as Marconi’s first successful wireless transmission.   It was though an ingenious inspiration whose utility lasted for about 60 seconds—which is about how long it took to develop a smarter way of transmitting an image in its entirety.

Mr. Lowd recognized that he could transmit the outline of a picture by placing on opaque tracing of the picture on top of a telegraphic ciphering sheet and then transmitting the coordinates, which when received on the other end could be connected by short lines into the picture that was being transmitted from the sending end.  Images constructed of numbers and letters and such had been made for centuries before this; this however is a very early use of this idea that was employed to human-representational transmit the object electrically over distances by wire.  Emoticons—a more abstract version of this idea--such as we know them today are actually better than 150 years old.  They appear as early as 1857 in the telegraphers’ world, and somewhat earlier in the typesetter’s arsenal. (For example, a later attempt, taken from Puck Magazine No. 212, page 65, 30 March 1881, shows us something that we took to be “new” in the 1980’s as having roots that spread downwards into history by another 120 years.)

But Mr. Loud’s idea was pretty, I must admit, even though it was far from being the answer to the question it addressed, with a more pleasing, technology-based solution appearing by 1899. 

(A successful apparatus for the true transmission of an image by wire is seen here, below, and was produced in 1899/1900.)

The other bit that is interesting is that this transmission of an image necessitated an early Surrealist-like poem, dictated by the cipher/codes that were use by necessity to send the picture. 

A Long, Low, Massive Circle: Circular Building, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 639  Blog Bookstore

This re-surfaced idea for a mega-spa was very wide, very long and very low.  Karl Stoldeck and J. Goldmerstein—architects and planners in Berlin—published a broad idea in 1928 called Thermenpalast (Thermal Palace, Spa Space, something like that), and although it seemed to satisfy almost everyone, the idea was consumed in the general economic malaise of the depression of 1929.  It looks as though the idea had a little life again in 1934, but there was a problem with fund raising.  The idea came back again, broader, bigger, and more defined, finding some idea-space in the Popular Science Monthly for March, 1938.

The structure for health and exercise was massive—as a matter of fact, it would’ve been the most massive circular project in history.  The building had 6.5 acres under glass, which makes it 280k or so feet, giving the building a diameter of 1,800 feet and a circumference of something just over a mile.  IT looks as though the ceiling reached a maximum of 250’ or so; seeing that the dome would also be about 1200, that presents a little engineering problem.  But no matter:  it would never be built, anyway, even with Nazi dollars from home.

The building was quite a feast of the body—there was a mountainside panorama around the exterior wall, illuminated from a  series of light sources from the ceiling.  In diminishing concentric circles: there was a mile-long running track, a promenade just inside that, followed by a spectacular pool which looks to be 4000’ long and 100’ wide!  Interior to the pool was a wide “beach”, a restaurant, park and lounging area.

This was also a multi-floor building, with gyms and restaurants and a long series of health baths.  The entire spectacle would offer many different climates depending on the needs of the clientele. 

The cost:  6 million, U.S. A few years earlier the Empire State  building was built for $24,718,000. The architectural firm Foster + Partners released designs for a the largest building (“Crystal Island”)  ever built:  2.5 million square meters (8.2 million feet, or 35 times bigger than this 1938 idea), with a tower 1476 feet tall, all sort of circular, and to be built in Moscow.

Had the thing been built in Berlin and started in 1938, it would’ve been about ready to bombed on the day of its completion. 

Here's an interesting read on water parks:  Water, leisure and culture: European historical perspectives, Susan C. Anderson, Bruce H. Tabb, 2002.

A Short Homage to the Alphanetical Past of Union-Made American Brooms

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 584
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I was breezing through what seems to be an innocuous forgotten document:  the 1941 Union Label Catalogue-Directory. It lists the union labels of trades who were part of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a 32-page pamphlet advising its readers on how to hunt for union-made goods, and to get the union-earned dollar spent with other unions. Even though only 68 years old, the list of unions seems far more antiquarian, the unions and the jobs/workers they protected seemingly from another, earlier time: the Allied Printing Trades, Cigar Makers, Clerks Protective Association, Glove Workers, Hatters, Horse Shoers, Meat Cutters, Pocketbook Workers, Novelty Workers, Sheep Shearers, Stereotypers, Telegraphers, Wall Paper craftsman, and on and on.   

But it was the broom and whisk makers union label that really struck me. There is something beautiful and sad in this design--the design is lovely as is the idea of the workers who were probably protected by the union; what is instantly saddening is the recognition of the incongruity that such a trade was widespread enough to need protection and organization, and how far gone such industries are. Really gone. 

Looking through the names on the list of union shops of broom and whisk makers suggests elements for a poem on vanished brooms.  There is of course the Ace Broom Company, and the Acme, and, yes, the American Broom Company; followed by the Amor, Artzcraftz, Baria, Bard, Birminham, Best, Brown, Buckholtz, Burlington, Coleman, Continental, Eagle, Galesburg, Haferman and Hanset, Ideal, Imperial, Lighthouse, Mid-West, Montana, M & M, Mutual, National, Progress, Progressive, Rainbow, Reliable, Rich, Royal, Western, Terre Haute and Zenith.  The "R's" have the field, hands down. 

The pamphlet ably describes the design and its color, and where the label appeared on the product.  In the case of the brooms and whisks, it also assured the purchaser that the product was not made by "contract prison labor".  (I have a prison-manufactured catalog from Angola Prison here that I'll have to write about some day--published in 1937, it was glossy and thick, offering hundreds (?!) of items for the office and home, but mostly heartpine and heavy oak goods for white collar consumption.  The scale of the operation is pretty surprising to me.)

I like the whole idea of the handshake, the square deal, the care in the construction of the broom.  I just looks right.  And as you well know a good broom is a thing of beauty--it will do its just correctly and last forever. 

A Battleship in Union Square: the “USS” Recruit, 1917, & the Invention of the Word “Landship"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 559

Well, perhaps this isn’t the origin of the word “landship”, but it does make for a snappy title.  The fact of the matter is that the Mayor of NYC, John Purroy Mitchel,  had this model of a ship (designed by Donn Barber and Jules Guerin, and sort of based on the USS Maine) built to attract greater numbers to the city’s recruiting station, as it lagged behind the established quota of 2000 enlistments for the Navy with only 900 men.  The 200 x 40 foot landship did the job, gaining 25,000 recruits (until it was disassembled in 1920), though it didn’t work very much magic for the mayor, who lost his election later in the year.  Actually, the gung-ho Mitchel lost his entire life in 1918, after volunteering for the Army Air Corps and dying in a training accident. 

Ars Memoria--Giordano Bruno and the Art of Memory

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post  509

The images presented here today are related to graphical memory, ars memorativa, the technique of aiding the storage (and retrieval!) of info in the human brain.  This was accomplished  by mnemonic devices that associated the location of the data with a striking or jarring or geometric image, all structured in such a way that the correlation of the continued image would relate to more and deeper remembered information, one bit leading to the next, expanding into other bits, and so on, in a kind of fractal way.  The visual tools held a space for the data; they were a constant structure into which information could be poured, allowing for chains of info to be formed and retrieved.  And so by the effort of visualizing the structure of where the memories where (supposed to be) the user would be able to recall them by simply remembering their placement, and since the structure built on itself, one memory would lead to the next, and so on, a cascade of rushing memories.

Giordano Bruno (who I wrote a little about here some time ago) established his system in 1582 based upon the concentric circles of Raymond Lull, grouping the circles with symbols and letters and other designs,. Forming tighter cells of memory, much in line with the long practices of the later Hermeticists. 

Part of the goal, it seems to me, was to be able to not only recall this information, but to be able to get it out of the way, so to speak, to be able to put all of the factual stuff necessary to think in a safe place so that real thinking could be done.  Bruno was one of those who tried to go beyond the veil of the known by having a clear, orerdly mind.  Also, the process of getting there—to the point where you have a lot of info loaded into these memory spaces—involved lots of quiet time, or meditation, or deep thought, or something, which also led in that inexorable way to a finer modality of thinking.  (Jeff, Laura?) Perhaps it was a mode of composition that could only come after long, deep meditation and memory exercises.

Certainly this approach to though/logic/rhetoric/composition is nothing new.  Ancient it is, really.  This sort of process reaches way back to the Egyptians, and to Cicero's De oratore (Bk II 350-360), and the Rhetorica ad Herennium, (ca. 90 BCE), and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (Bk XI), and (of course) Aristotle  On The Soul and On Memory and Reminiscence; to the delightful Matteo Ricci  A Treatise On Mnemonics and to Simonides of Ceos, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Cosmos Rossellius Theasurus artificosae memoria (1579).; to Jacobus Publicius, Oritoriae artis epitome,  Peter of Ravenna, Phoenix, sive artificiosa memoria,  and to Johannes Romberch, Congestorium artificiose memorie.  And these are examples that don’t get us even out of the 16^th century. 

Some of the writers listed above used memory devices that were architectural in style, or showed levels of the heaven and earth as memory place-holders, or used the human body and body parts to elegantly display to the mind where the memory was hiding on the body.  I've included one example from Johannes Romberch--who used city and architectural images in addition to a wide assortment of astronomical, alphabetical and geographical devices--because it is an extremely early depiction of a bookstore (in the upper right, "bibliopola").

The practice of the art of memory was taken by some groups as a sort of religious experience--as a matter of fact even in the late 18th century the Quakers thought enough of the practice to want it banned, leading as it did to too much thought on matters that were far strewn from religious tolerances.  Some of the ars memoria practices, like those of Lull, were too far removed into the spheres of the esoteric and astrologic to do much good for the Straight & True believer.  The great historian of memory, Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, says the following about Lull:

"Lullism had a vast diffusion which has only recently begun to be systematically studied. Owing to the core of Platonism, and of Scotist Neoplatonism, within it, it formed a current which, not acceptable to many in the ages dominated by scholasticism, found itself in a much more welcoming atmosphere at the Renaissance. A symptom of the popularity that it would gain in the full Renaissance is the interest accorded to it by Nicholas of Cusa. In the full Neoplatonic stream of the Renaissance, stemming from Ficino and Pico, Lullism took a place of honor. Renaissance Neoplatonists were able to recognize in it notions very congenial to them and reaching them from mediaeval sources which, unlike the humanists, they did not despise as barbarous.

"There is even, at the heart of Lullism, a kind of interpretation of astral influences which would have aroused interest in the age of Ficino and Pico. When the Art is done on the level coelum, it becomes a manipulation of the twelve signs of the zodiac and the seven planets, in combination with B to K, to form a kind of benevolent astral science, which can be worked as astral medicine, and which, as Lull points out in the preface to his Tractatus de astronomia, is a very different matter from ordinary judicial astrology.... Lullism thus establishes itself at the Renaissance as belonging with the fashionable philosophy, and becomes assimilated to various aspects of the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition. "  (p. 187-8)

Be that as it may, I do have a soft place for Bruno, the defrocked Franciscan who met his end in flames*.  He may have actually been of great value to the birth of modern science, perhaps not--he did seem to have the idea of the infinite universe and the idea of the fluidity of time and space, along with some other stuff (see extended reading) that rubbed the Catholic fur in the wrong direction.  Needless to say, the Church's foundation felt threatened by Bruno's cosmological beliefs, and found that the best thing to do about dealing with superior and scientific thinking to their own was to burn the author. 

Looking Straight-On at Things in Antique Prints, Part 2

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 483 (continuing Post 20)

In one of my earliest posts on this blog I wrote: I've always been intrigued by antiquarian images that looked straight down, or up, at things--90 degree, perpendicular, real straight-on stuff, giving a feel for depth (or height) and perspective.  Funny thing is that in the wide world of scientific images, they really don't show up very often."  Still rue.  I really haven't noticed that many straight-on images--perhaps the paucity of these things is as simple as them not being "as pretty" as other views.  I have found another, today, showing the interior of the "spacious RAF" Vickers "Victoria" troop carrier aircraft for (January 5) 1929.  It was indeed spacious for the time, and was one of the largest planes in the air. 

The Vickers Victoria first flew in 1922—this 1929 monster was powered by two 570hp engines which allowed it to cruise at a modest 110 mph, taking it 11 minutes to climb to 4900 feet.  It had a crew of two and carried 22 troops—it looked as though it might do more than that, but this was quite a load given the time and the altitude at which the plane would function.  As you can see by the fellow standing in the foreground, it was a very tall plane—17 feet tall, with a 59’ long body on a massive  87’ wingspan (that made even more impressive by the wings’ 2,178 square foot surface). 

 

The view here is from the rear of the aircraft looking straight forward, and I notice that the pilots didn’t have any backrest for their seats.  The interior, even though fairly threadbare and essential, did have upholstered seats for the folding chairs. 

The Car as the Dominating "Life" Form in the U.S.: Finding Places to Rest the Populating Automobile, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 481

If I was an alien (of the outer-space variety) looking at the United States, I’d find it difficult not to assume that the biological units scurrying around the place were not put there to service the automobile.  Cars get born, then put on display, then selected and driven to their new home.  They get washed, and fed, and sometimes have their own places to sleep at night in their very own structure with their caretakers housed nearby.  They get taken out for airs in the morning and evening, resting while the humans labor all day to make enough money for their care and maintenance and feeding.  In the evening, they get brought back home and allowed to rest further.  They respond directly to inputs only and give no unsolicited response:  sort of like cats.  Fantastically large allowances are made for cars, humans going so far as to remove life- and atmospheric-sustaining biological units such as trees and good dirt so that the car can be taken virtually anywhere in the country on a path made specifically for them.  These pathways, which are padded and smooth, have ancillary bits attached to them so that the humans may walk beside them—houses and such are all connected to these paths to more easily enable the people to have access and maintain the car.  And, at the end of the day, humans breathe in the very excrement and excretia produced by the cars.  Placed under a microscope, the whole thing might resemble a biological unit, the cars being its very blood, everything else present to contain and move it.

 

These images from the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig, issue 4484, pp 239-240) for November 1930 speak to the exact issue of how to care for the now ever-present automobile.  Entitled “Wie Bringe Ich Meinen Kraftwagen Unter?”, the short article (by the engineer Botho von Romer of Munchen) addresses the need of what to do with cars at bedtime—where do we put them?  One answer was this spectacular carpark (“Garagenhof”) high rise—seventeen floors of parking (with two more underground), serviced by a variety of elevators, pointing out that varieties of this structure already existed in Chicago and New York

There was also the possibility of vast masses of sunken garages, their entrance way screwed into the earth leading to tunnels and networked warehouses where the cars could be safely deposited and removed from city streets.  There were also these two versions of the simple above-ground garages and parking lots:  the apartment block gives over the entire interior area to individual parking and garages (doing away with any greenspace), while the massive semi-cloverleaf design is made for nothing else in mind than to park the cars in the four semi-centers.

 

By 1930 the production of the automobile had been revolutionized to such an extent that virtually anyone with a job and less than five kids could actually afford a car.  It is interesting to note that at the average price of say 30 cents a gallon for gasoline (in the U.S.A.) that folks 80 years ago were paying pretty more per gallon (adjusted via CPI) than we are paying now at $1.87/gallon (in my mountain city at the far end of the pipeline). 

The 18th Century Bible on Dutch Canal and Dam Construction: Tileman Horst Theatrum Machinarum, 1737

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 461

Tileman van der Horst and Jan Schenk produced the Theatrum Machinarium Univesale*, one of the most celebrated works on the construction of all those elements so necessary to keeping life dry in Amsterdam 9the place of the book’s publication).  It was perhaps the most important work then produced on dikes, sluices, dams, weirs, canals and swing-bridges, the very elements of existence in Holland.  Jan Schenck was the engraver of this work, which may also be the most accurate and the most sumptuously illustrated book of its type in Holland in the 18^th century—the technical aspects of the rendering was just superb. In the image (which is a detail of a detail of a larger folding plate) I reproduced at left and below we see that Schenk and Horst weren’t kidding around in their treatise:  what we see here is the elevation for a plan showing the laying-in of pilings for a larger structure.  This is still tricky business today in Amsterdam, given the soil structures on which the city is built, some of these pilings go down hundreds of feet.  This group of about fifty men is certainly struggling with something big; but just how big it is I do not know.  (They do look rather well-dressed for being about to muck around in the foundation area of a structure.) And this draws my attention to the planks on which they all stand; the boards seem just enormous, looking to be two feet wide and several inches thick, and long.  I’d be very curious to know where this lumber was coming from, as I feel it certainly wasn’t local.

*Theatrum Machinarum Universale.. of Keurige Verzameling van .. Waterwerken, Schutsluizen, waterkeringen, ophaal- en draaibruggen. Printed in Amsterdam., by Petrus Schenk en Zoon, 1757-74.  Illustrated with 50 engravings on 47 partly folding plates.

Ships in the Skyline, Part V: Cities INSIDE of Ships

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 308       

In trailing some loose associative memories of ships being compared to skylines, and seeing he ships placed in the skylines, I was able to find four good samples.  This one is, in a way, the negative version of that, showing cities placed inside of the ships, the ship in this case being the White Star triple-screw Olympic--which at the time was the largest ship ever launched at 882'--and the image found in The Illustrated London News for 22 October 1910.  It was done in celebration of the launch of the ship from Belfast, which was also the heaviest transference of weight (27,000 tons) from land to water in history.   To illustrate the ship's massiveness the picture editor placed a row of hotels and buildings bounded by the eastern end of Burlington House to the very edge of Piccadilly Circus, with the Piccadilly Hotel (height 77' 6") right there in the middle under the first three smoke stacks. 

The second image relates the passenger capacity of the Olympic to the Savoy Hotel, showing a floating platform with four of these massive hotels.  The Illustrated London News was making a real point about the Olympic and the Savoy, because at around this time smaller ships were referred to as "floating hotels"; the Olympic, on the other hand, was much more than that--it was four floating hotels, and big ones, at that, and the image captures that perfectly. 

Truth be told, I really like the image of the floating hotels out of context and without a caption--it really makes the case for the idea of a Floating City in a Floating World. 

[CLick for a larger, clearer image]

Ships in the Skyline Part III

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 291

In another unlikely-to-be-added-to category, Ships in the Skyline, I've found, surprisingly, a third installment. (I guess that there are many more as I've found these guys without actually looking for them, though perhaps that is the trick to finding things (that you don't need).)  The comparisons that we see here for the ship The Cunarder, appeared in The Illustrated London News for 29 September 1934, and the skyline that it  is favored against is  London's Big Ben.  Interestingly, the graphic goes on to compare the powertrain of the ship to 100 "Cock o' the North type locomotives" to generate its 200,000 horsepower; also, the amount of steel frame found in the ship  (32,000 tons) is comparable to the steel framing of the brand-new Empire State Building (58,000 tons in the steel framework).  Of further interest is the relief of a human set against the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square and the top of the ship's fore funnel (reaching 170').  This is just fantastic design and some good thinking about how to make the dimensions of the ship more understandable in everyday terms, and thus compares it in size and capacity to stuff that people see most every day, or at least know.

   

A 117x1 Mile Blanket of Planes: What 185,000 Planes Looks Like

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 289

This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943 (It reminds me too of an earlier post I did with a similar cover for LIFE magazine here.) The caption reads: "185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles" which is actually a double blanket of planes--if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.

The reality of the situation was greater than this:  by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor.  And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year.  The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years.   I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything.  I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well. 

The Beauty of Drill Bits in the Dark Days of 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 287

 This striking ad for Emil Steinrurck's drill bit manufacturing company (Verlangen Sie Spiralbohrer-Katalog und Lagerlisten) appeared in the magazine Motor for July/.August 1918, just a few months away from the German defeat in WWI.  Steinruck's Heidelberg business was making some massive, industrial  drill bits is all I can say, and they had a designer and artist who figured out exactly how to relate this to the motorheads reading this magazine--all care being taken and monies spent just as the guns of August turned into the corrupted plougshares of November.  What self-respecting machinist wouldn't, or couldn't, appreciate the beauty and depth of this thing even if a rusty old railway car was waiting just minutes in the future to spirit away the immediate future of Europe?  The small detail (of the factories and whatever weirdly empty buildings there were in the background) were miniature works in themselves.

 

On the other hand, on the back of this full page ad appears another--a frilly, high-nouveau-y grillwork ad for the Horch automobile, forming the other representative book end to the manufacturing process.  Horch began producing 4.5 hp automobiles as early as 1901, and by 1918 had improve and upgraded to produce high-end luxury automobiles. I can't determine what exact model of Horch this is in the ad, but I can tell that it is massive, with a tremendous wheelbase.  (Horch would merge/found Audi in 1932 and meet its fate in Allied bombing raids during the war.  It survived but in the hands of the Soviets who used the machinery to produce the Yugo-like Trabant (Trabbi") sub-compact "car". I guess that the artwork is sorta beautiful in its way. 

The Art of Writing in the Dark: a Fire-Lit Alphabet,1808

JF Ptak Science Books LLC, Post 265

This curious illustration appears in forty-five volume Cyclopedia of  Abraham Rees (published 1795-1820), displaying a system for communicating over distances at night.  When this part of the Cyclopedia was printed in 1808, the electrical telegraph was still 37 years away from coming into being--45 years from being somewhat well-used.  Before this time (visual) communications over long distances at night were limited to just these sorts of means--lighted semaphores, hand-held torches, that sort of thing.  Signaling at sea at night was somewhat different at this time and didn't include anything remotely close to the alphabet.  So the rather complex system that we see at left is extremely uncommon--it seems also very cumbersome to put into effect.  Unfortunately I don't have the text volume that would explain then entire system and implementation, so I'm going to guess that there was a large, powerful light source that was covered by a tight, black, covering tablet that would eliminate nearly all light leakage.  The symbols for each letter of the alphabet (and numerals) would be cut out from another tablet that would fit over the face of the light source, placed between the blank and the light.  To transmit a letter the user would then simply remove the blank covering tablet to reveal the light broadcast by the hole or slit in the tablet underneath.  The blank would then be placed back, a new tablet for a new letter placed underneath, and the process would begin again:  blank (dark); letter (light); blank (dark); letter (light), and so on to the end of the message.   I guess the distance at which these symbols could be seen would be dependent on light source, atmospheric conditions, ad so on.  The way that the letters are made into symbols seems to me very intelligent, so that you distinguish the differences from an appreciable distance.  I like it--its an elegant idea.  (Well, maybe it didn't work in this manner, but it seems to make sense to me.)

The image of the full sheet:

The Magnificent Mundane: an Instructional WITH PROP on How to Use the Telephone, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 236

Yes, this elegant, well written (oversized) 1946 pamphlet, which explains in fabulous and excruciating detail how to use the telephone, does indeed come with a two-part heavy paper telephone receiver for the reader's practice. It is packaged in an envelope in the back of the pamphlet with a large drawing explaining how to put the two pieces together.   The work is just so fulsome, wholesome, forthright, exacting and thorough that it just makes the casual reader stop in their tracks.  For example, it isn't until page 13 that we get to pick up the receiver (and listen for the dial tone). I've reproduced some of the table of contents to give an idea of the extent of the telephone usage. 

What brings this so close to being from out of the science fiction past is that the booklet is ten years older than me.  Atanasoff's ABC, Bell Labs Mark II, Bletchley's  Colossus, and Harvard's Mark I machines existed, television was getting off the ground, and telephones were exploding their way into more American homes and businesses.  But somehow, here on the verge of the greatest electrical revolution in history, we're still getting instructions on how to pick up the telephone.  But I'm really not complaining here, not at all--its just the nexus of the "how to listen for a dial tone" and the coming of the ENIAC one year after this pamphlet is published that is so startling.

Even so, this instructional is more complete and (of course) better written than any of the pc manuals that came with any of the machines that I've purchase int the last 25 years. It is a thing of great and supra-obvious beauty.

Again, this is another example of a small job done Very Correctly.

(Click on image to expand.)