Ptak Science Books

Found Dadaist Art--Architectural Imperialism in Fashion, 1931

John F. Ptak — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:30:30 -0500

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[I’ve written a few times in this blog about what I think is found/unintentional antiquarian Dadaist art, as in Floating Eyes and Ears, 1650, (and also (here, here and here) and would like to continue that thread with this found bit of 1930's Costumery.]

The Beaux Arts Ball, Halloween 1931, featured a dozen or so of some of the principal architects in NYC dressed as their most esteemed structures. The end result in this uncomfortable assembly is delightfully absurd--the outfits could have easily been found on stage in Berlin in 1923 than as this salute to privilege. (For example see my post from last week on Oskar Schlemmer.)

For the record, we see:

A. Stewart Walker, dressed (and almost completely engulfed) as his Fuller Building at 57th Street (and not the Fuller building which is today known as as the Flat Iron Building);

Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf Astoria;

Ely Jacques as the Squibb Building (so delightfully nestled in there with the Plaza and Savoy Plaza);

William Van Alen as the Chrysler Building (which, three years now after its groundbreaking, was still the tallest building in the world, though it would be eclipsed within months by the completed Empire State Building. The New York Times Building is the exact height of the Chrysler Building, though this bleak structure in no other way can compare to Alen's masterpiece.)

Ralph Walker as One Wall Street;

D.E. Wood as the Metropolitan Life Building;

J.H. Friedlander as the Museum of the City of New York.

Source: Blom's New York Photographs, 1850-1950, page 48.

Unusual Aircraft: the Handley Page Harrow, 1938

John F. Ptak — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:21:25 -0500

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I don’t have much to connect with this image, save to say that it is (to me) an unusual view inside one of Britain’s early heavy bombers, the Handley Page Harrow. It was a beast of a plane, 88x82x19, with two 830 hp engines, a big, slowish, wide-turning affair with 3000 pounds of payload (which doesn’t seem like a lot to me). The co-pilot is standing straight-up in the control area of the aircraft, with plenty of headroom to spare—something that I couldn’t do anywhere in the B-17e, and I’m only (just shy of) 6-foot. He seems, maybe, to be calculating ground speed (with a circular slide or ground-speed calculator?) at the navigator’s table, standing there next to the seated radioman.

It seems that it had a mixed experience during the war. It was intended to be a troop carrier when it was design in the mid-1930’s, and by the end of the war there were only five of them left in service, which were removed from the RAF in June of that year. I suspect that when this image was published in The Illustrated London News on 12 March 1938, Britain was trying to quickly react the growing and desperate situation with Germany, and the Harrow was meant to plug a few gaping holes in the missing bomber bits of the RAF's forces.

I like the plane’s design, though I think it wasn’t intended to be a plane seen in combat, necessarily.

Window Shopping with Berenice Abbott, 1935

John F. Ptak — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:27:18 -0500

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I enjoy antiquarian window shopping, browsing photos or engravings that depict goods for sale-- especially if the prices are posted. I came back to this deep-in-the-Depression-fantastic photo made in 1935 by Berenice Abbott (Springfield, Ohio, 1898-1991). Blossom Restaurant, NYC was part of Abbott’s effort funded by the WPA, this time as a part of her Changing New York Project, and captures the restaurant and neighboring barber shop at 103 Bowery. The two businesses actually occupied the first floors and basement (respectively) of the Boston Hotel, a standard flop house in a tough and distressed part of the city that rented beds by the day, with 249 small door-less cubicles offering a decent place to spend the night for 30 cents¹.

30 cents seems to be the going rate for a bunch of things going on in this picture—30 cents for a night in the hotel, 30 cents for the better offers of Morris Gordon’s restaurant. 30 cents for a haircut and shave, 30 cents for a “women’s hair bob”² and so on. Which seems about right—a fancy haircut and a decent better-than-average dinner for two will probably cost about the same, today.

If you were really on a tight budget, 30 cents would buy you three vegetarian dinners, or 6 offerings of bread and soup, or three visits to the table of meatballs and bans, or pigs feet and kraut.

The price of a stick-to-your-ribs meal of sirloin and potatoes and a pot of coffee also cost about the same as a gallon and a half of gasoline (which cost about 20 cents). The same amount of gas today would get you a serving at McDonalds, or something on that order, and perhaps even a happy take-away for the kids. Perhaps the two even out.

30 cents might get you a loaf of bread, and wouldn’t quite get you a dozen eggs. Now this is remarkable, because if you adjust all of this according to modest CPI measures, the average cost of a dozen eggs in 1935 was 37 cents, or (according to the US Census website generating 1935 to 2009 prices adjusting to CPI) $5.84. The bread would cost $4.74 in 2009 dollars, which means that the staples today—milk, bread, butter, eggs, were more expensive in 1935 than today. Ditto gasoline, which cost 19 cents a gallon, or $3 today—actually this would be much more expensive in 1935 as the mileage the cars were getting then (and the octane) was much lower, so the cost of running an automobile was considerably higher. The cost of the car itself, though, still favors the ‘thirties for modest transportation, which came in at about 600 dollars, or just over $9000 in 2009 dollars³.

The 3-cent first class postage stamp of 1935 was more expensive than first class postage in 2009: 47 cents versus 44. When you look at the increases and bitty spikes of the cost of a first class stamp over time the whole thing looks pretty flat.

The average salary for a family of four in 1935 was about 1500/year, which oddly enough is about the same for the poverty guideline level for 2009 established by the Department of Health and Human Services (about $23,000). Minimum wage legislation didn’t begin until 1938, but if you take a look at one of my earlier posts here on the history of this idea you’ll see that the recent history of legislating a meaningful level of acceptance for a base living wage is mainly disgraceful, with relatively little accomplished (in adjusted economic terms) for half a century. (The new minimum wage brings us to about a mid-way point as the highest minimum wages paid in the 71-year history of the program.)

And so I thank Ms Abbott again for her beautiful social commentary, and a happy 75^th birthday to this photograph.

Notes

1.A fantastic website and resource for changing aspects of NYC can be found here, at Frank Levere’s Changing New York site. http://www.newyorkchanging.com/

2. I wrote a little bit about the appearance of women-only hair salons in my post “The Staggering Beauty of Barber Shops” http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/02/the-staggering-beauty-of-barber-shops-naive-surreal-department-22.html

3. Other bits of what stuff cost in 1935:

Flour (5 lbs) 25.3 cents

Bread (lb) 8.3

Round steak (lb) 36.0

Bacon (lb) 41.3

Butter (lb) 36.0

Eggs (doz.) 37.6

Milk (1/2 gal.) 23.4

Oranges (doz.) 22.0

Potatoes (10 lbs) 19.1

Coffee (lb) 25.7

Sugar (5 lbs) 28.2

Car: $580

Gasoline: 19 cents/gal

House: $6,300

Bread: 8 cents/loaf

Milk: 47 cents/gal

Postage Stamp: 3 cents

Postman's Dream: the First Mass Book Burnings in America

John F. Ptak — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:23:06 -0500

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Seeing the expanding number of sales catalogs arriving in the mail for the holiday season put me in the mind for this post.

In the Areopagitica John Milton reaches into the heavens to condemn the destroyer of all books, finding them soulless monsters who would destroy Reason itself. Well, there are monsters like this that may be demons, and monsters that may be anointed avengers, tunneling Milton or not.

Books have been destroyed for as long as they have been made, for reasons as varied as those for their writing: the motivations for biblio-devastation are ever-reaching. Perhaps the most astounding and appalling of them all resides in the fetid memory and fouled grave of the Chinese emperor Shi Huang Ti (third century BCE), who in his 49 years of life liquidated nearly every book in China, psychotically determined to make himself the most-remembered person in history by eliminating history itself. Not to be outdone by books, he eliminated authors as well. And scholars.

Authors not only have been killed for their works, some have followed them directly into the flames. Michael Servetus, who has a complicated history and who was found wanting in his relationship with church orthodoxy on many levels, met his end on a pyre with his books. One of those books, a medical text, challenged the (religious) orthodoxy of the brain being the seat of all power and wisdom of the body, stating that it was the heart that pumped the blood and not the head, providing another chink in the armor of theological doctrine. Pissed as the reigning Christians were with this belief, this book probably was not the thing that most annoyed them, but it also didn't help his case, either. But no matter, he and his books were burned together to ashes for reasonable and logical thought.

But getting back to our Postman's Dream: Ulysses, The Grapes of Wrath, Lettres d'un Provincial, Leaves of Grass, Analects of Confucius are all burned books, and books burned in massive, orchestrated displays, and all of which share the same incendiary thread with the postman's nightmare, the Sears & Roebuck Catalog. It was the other wrist-bending catalogs too that wound up in various burning piles in America in the early 20th century, though they didn't find their ways there like other burned and banned books--this wasn't personal, just business. As it turns out local business throughout the country felt threatened by mail order businesses, and that these remotely-located companies were reaching into the local community and extracting the money that should've been going to local concerns. And so to fight this economic invasion there were town-wide book burnings of whichever of these extra-local catalogs could be found. These first mass book burnings in America was a completely unsatisfactory response to their threat, as townsfolk quickly voted with their pocketbooks, whether their shirtsleeves were burned in the catalog fires or not, the smokey burden of free enterprise. It was the least wise way of fighting this new wave of competition, obviously, but the idea held enough firey charm to have made itself felt in the pages of history. It was also just another short step in the continuing buy-local hardship that has been fought in this country since the Concord pin-maker was threatened by the larger pin-making factory in Boston in the 18th century.

And so far as the postman goes, burning the catalogs wouldn't have helped them, either--they just would have had to deliver a replacement copy, adding to their work load, burdened further in the Christmas crush.

The History of the Future of Skyscrapers: Thomas Nast, 1881

John F. Ptak — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:11:47 -0500

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Thomas Nast (1840-1902) was an extraordinary talent who created the politically/socially influential political cartoon. He worked tirelessly for Harper’s Weekly, joining the weekly illustrated newspaper in 1858 at the age of 19, contributing at least one large (usually front cover) political statement and two smaller cartoons every week, for 26 years.

He wielded an enormous social influence, electing a president (Hayes) and toppling Boss Tweed. He was a staunch Republican who endlessly fought for balanced budgets, free education, and equal rights for Indians and Blacks, fair economic play to the working classes, and was viciously anti Klan. He also created the popular images of Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, the Republican elephant Democrat donkey, and the Tammany tiger. The man got a lot of things right¹.

Another bit of the future that came to a pretty accurate light under his pen was this view of New York City. Printed in 1881, “New York in a Few Years from Now, View from the Bay”, shows a NYC skyline that—if the scale was returned to normal—would’ve looked pretty accurate at the turn of the century. Nast drew a grouping of large skyscrapers rising from around the battery (a ferry terminal visible at front-center), reaching about 30 stories or so. Since he was a caricaturist/cartoonist, the buildings are drawn out of scale to enhance the vision—given the other available details (including the way too tall Trinity Church lurking in the shadows), the skyline would’ve been about half the size if drawn for accuracy’s sake. But Nast wasn’t looking for accuracy, but a vision. If everything were scaled to a more accurate perspective, he would’ve been pretty close to the skyline in 1900.

It was a very commendable job by Nast, who produced the drawing at the very dawn of the modern skyscraper age, just at the very beginning of the building and design practices tat would make it possible to build structures that were dozens of stories tall. The greatest advance was the introduction of cage frame construction, which started to appear ten years earlier, but most of the other stuff necessary to have tall structures—heating and cooling capacities, electrical lighting, plumbing [with appropriate, siphon jet toilets], elevators with dependable brakes—weren’t really introduced until just after this cartoon appeared. As a matter of fact, Nast’s work even preceded the great building boom that would occur just after publication, which was a response of sorts to the depression and malaise of the middle/.late 1870’s. The greatest of these early tall buildings, the Joseph Pulitzer New York World building, looked quite like one of these Nast structures—and was built in 1889/90, rising 300 feet or so into the air.

Nast’s buildings even preceded the invention of the word “skyscraper”, which would appear in his own Harper’s Weekly in 1893.

Given his workload, Nast’s drawing was undoubtedly a quick work. Greater, grander, more science-fiction-y views o the future of NYC were to come, but generally these were almost entirely post-airplane/automobile.

Works like King’s Views of New York ²(1911) featured colossal structures with roads connecting the tops of buildings, perilously airplane-congested skies, and so on—but generally appeared after the necessary technologically-based innovations supplied more necessary imaginative/creative tools to create more incredible cities. But that’s another story. As I said, I think Nast did a marvelous job with the materials on hand.

Notes:

1. "The Historic Elephant and Donkey; It Was Thomas Nast "Father of the American Cartoon," Who Brought Them Into Politics." (PDF). New York Times.

2. See Edison Effect blog, here, for a nice post on King's Views.

Bad Ideas Department: Underground Cities, 1934

John F. Ptak — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:51:22 -0500

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I’m a sucker for cross sections, and this one has it all—nicely drawn, a glimpse into the possibilities of the future, and technoid removed from the realm of possibility. This article appears in Popular Science Monthly for June, 1934, and presents the possibility of extending downward into the earth for future city development. (as a matter of fact, the fabulous Modern Mechanix site has a similar story on display, asking the question “Are Skyscrapers Doomed?” for the same year, with the same engineers.) Well. It seems as though in this cross section that residences for people begin below the thirtieth floor, making living quarters starting at about 350’ down. The story goes that it would be possible to dig these cities up to about 6,000 feet into the earth, which of course is a long way down. Its difficult enough to drill an oil well hole to this depth; its difficult to imagine digging/outfitting/removing the earth from something—I’m not even sure what to call it—that was, potentially, thousands of feet deep and miles wide and long. That’s playing with figures of a million cubic feet. Of construction. Underground.

Bad Ideas Department: Futurized Obsolescence of an Airport ABOVE the River Thames

John F. Ptak — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:32:20 -0500

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Its funny how one can live the future in the present but not see any part of that future’s future. Evidently completely enveloped in the flying frenzy of the 1930’s, planners in London considered constructing an airport above the River Thames. This rendition from Popular Science Monthly (January 1934) shows the beast laid out from just above Westminster Bridge to the (newly opened) Lambeth Bridge, covering the entire width of the river, with the runways running almost directly into the Victoria Tower of Westminster Palace.

The structure had almost everything going for it to be built in the bad category department: it was big, ugly, unnecessary, dangerous, a hideous eyesore and an architectural atom bomb. It also would have been almost antiquated by the time it was built, serving as it did nothing but very small single-prop biplanes, virtually useless by the time larger multi-engine propeller planes and jet aircraft would appear just a decade and a half into the future. The thing was built high enough (the top looking to be at least 300’ high, comparing it to the Victoria Tower) by the forward-thinking planners to accommodate “the tallest masts of ships”. No one seemed to take any piece of the future into consideration in planning this monster—the planning seemed to take place as a retro event, as though the thinking was being done in 1910 rather than 1934.

This was a piece of engineering so devoid of the possibilities of future development that just as a crew on one end of the airport was finishing, it would’ve been just about time for a crew on the first-finished end to start demolishing it, an exercise in futurizing obsolescence. I’d say that if you could both build something and take it down in one continuous movement, the thing should probably not be built

Hermann Goering, IG Farben and Zyklon-B

John F. Ptak — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:35:30 -0500

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I’ve been reading Nuremberg Interviews (Knopf, 2004) by the American Leon Goldensohn, a psychiatrist who conducted interviews with 19 of the 24 “premier” Nazis brought to trial at Nuremberg in 1945/6. Goldensohn had a relatively workman-like approach to dealing with his subjects, leaving many dangling questions and comments not pursued. On the other hand, he may not have been the type of psychiatrist who asked any questions at all of his patients, so at the very least we do have an interesting insight into these failed people that we would not have had otherwise.

Of all the interviews, I was most struck with the incredible understatements made by Hermann Goering (Field Marshal and once second in line to Hitler as a hand-picked successor) regarding the extermination camps. Goering maintained that he really didn’t know anything about them, at all, but found them offensive to his “chivalric” (if not moral) code. He felt that the killing of the Jews in this manner would “give Germany a black eye” and as a tool of warfare it turned out “not to have been worth much”. But Goering continues: “If killing the Jews meant anything, such as that it meant the winning of the war, I would not have been bothered by it”.

Goering continues to explain that the killing of Jews as a result of “Goebbels’ hysterical propaganda” and “is not the way of a gentleman” .Also, the gassing women and children just wouldn’t do. He found gassing women to be “ungentlemanly, and thus would not have been able to authorize such a thing. Killing children, he said, would not have been “sportsmanlike”.

Goering said that he had heard “rumors” of mass killings, but he “knew that it would be useless” to investigate the rumors “even though it would have been easy” to be do so. His reasoning: he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it; and faced with that, he concluded, “it would make me feel bad”.

I’d give the benefit of the doubt to normal folks who would say something like this, that there was an error in translation, or some difficulty, or something. With Goering, I’d say that this was an accurate statement. Sportsmanship. He didn’t mention men in the gas chambers, but since he had defined his limits of gentlemanly and sportsman-like conduct, it stands to reason that the men were fair game in his mind. Only monsters think like this.

This was the man who had very well-monied support from American industrialists in the pre-1945, deep connections to Ford and Standard Oil, and thus from Standard to IG Farben, and then to Zyklon-B (and also HERE) and back again to the gas chamber. These connections are long and arduous, complex—but they really are there, the American support for the Nazi government, developed mainly for money but also for ideology. One of significant front man for the Nazi government is also one of Cornell’s 100 most illustrious alumni, Walter Teagle. Teagle was president of Standard Oil and partnered with the Nazis in 1938, one result being shared research and patents, some of which were crucial war materials like tetraethyl lead and synthetic rubber. (Tetraethyl lead was a fuel additive that in some respects made it possible for the Luftwaffe to attack and bomb London.) I use the term “front man” because of Teagle’s blatant lies to the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning true ownership and control of I.G. Farben’s American subsidiary, American I.G. Chemical Corporation. (It was happily believed that a Swiss subsidiary controlled the company rather than its Nazi owners. Teagle of course knew the truth.)

This is just one of a geographical dictionary of stories on the American/Nazi business connection and the financing of Hitler. It is a long and winding mass of roads, none of which is particularly pretty, many of which lead straight home, again. Henry Ford was impossibly ugly in all of this, a moral stain. But there were many like him as well.

Farben made a heavy contribution to the Nazi war effort, on many levels, in particular with explosives, where the company produced nearly all of the explosives used by the German army. Farben also swept into countries freshly occupied by the Wehrmacht to take over the industrial complexes, using and discarding indigenous workers as they saw fit and necessary. I think what most people think of when they think of I.G. Farben is their sustained involvement and investment in the extermination camps. For example, Auschwitz IG (and Buna-Werke) was a direct subsidiary of IG Farben which ran the Auschwitz III (or Monowitz, Monowice) labor camp, using and consuming some 50,000 slave laborers at a time at its various installments around the vast Auschwitz complex. These workers would be weeded out from time to time, with those too weak to work sent to the gas chambers at Birkenau.(Zyklon-B was used at Majdanek, Sachsenhausen and Operation Reinhard .)

In the appalling history of the gas chambers, it was almost by accident that Zyklon-B came to be used to exterminate human beings. Its function to that time was to exterminate bug pests, but experimentation showed that it worked lethally upon humans. Monumental amounts of Zyklon-B were sent to the extermination camps, all without question. Dr. Fritz ter Meer, one of the directors of Farben and who knew exactly what the vast amounts of Zyklon-B was being used for, was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity, though he was released after four years after the intervention of U.S. High Commissioner for Germany J.J. McCloy. (It was McCloy again, working with Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, who ensured that the massive Farben works at Frankfurt was taken off lists of American bombing targets in 1943 and 1944.) ter Meer returned to work for Farben after his imprisonment—though it wasn’t the old Farben anymore, the company having been slightly effaced, broken into several constituent elements. Ter Meer’s section of Farben was Bayer, as in Bayer aspirin, where he served as Chairman from 1952 to 1961. {Image below: political meeting at IG Farben.]

Dr. Fritz ter Meer, a director of IG Farben who was directly involved in developing the nerve gas, Zyklon-B, which killed millions of Jews, was sentenced to seven years in prison but was released after four years through the intervention of Rockefeller and J.J. McCloy, then U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. An unrepentant Fritz ter Meer, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, returned to work in Bayer where he served as Chairman for more than 10 years, until 1961.

Kurt Wurster, another director from Farben who was in charge of the Zyklon-B-producing subsidiary, Degesch ((Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH, or German Corporation for Pest Control), was acquitted of all war crime charges brought against him. He took charge of another part of the disbanded Farben empire, serving as CEO of BASF from 1962 to 1974. The directors of Testa, another Farben subsidiary producing Zyklon-B--Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher – met with a different end in a British Military court, and were executed.

And so on and on the story goes, unpretty tales of undeserved redemptions. For example, in the coming fight against the Soviets, the U.S. government developed a convenient amnesia regarding the atrocities committed by Wernher von Braun et alia, paperclipping them away to the U.S. to help develop the American missile and rocket capacities.

[Above: one of the many appearances of Hitler on the front page of Farben's newspaper, Von werk zu Werk.]

I think I’ve ground to be a bit of a halt, these posts supposing to be an hour’s effort—there is simply too much to put into a tiny synopsis like this. I just got stuck on Goering and Farben. Seeing these images from one of the many Farben publications with so many swastikas and so much Nazi symbolism made me terrifically sad…Yes, Farben was the largest backer of Hitler in his rise to power in 1931/32 and supplied even more after the election, and of course Farben received the most benefit than any other company in Germany as a result of the victory, but still, there is just so much of it... [See HERE for an interesting short item on the adaptation of Farben to nazism.]

In all of this the survivor has been Zyklon-B itself: it is still in production in the Czech Republic by Draslovka Kolin (Kolin), and is now known as Uragan D2.

[Some vintage footage from the trials at Nuremberg.]

The Invasion of America, 1942, Part II

John F. Ptak — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:18:31 -0500

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This is a continuation of an earlier post on mapping the invasion of America in 1942.

[It starts: LIFE Magazine issued a wake-up call of sorts to its readership in their 2 March 1942 issue. I say “of sorts” because even though this hard article (entitled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life”) must have sorely sobered some of its readers, it started on page 15, following big ads for Listerine, Matrix (women’s shoes, Bell Telephone, Modess, Clapp’s Baby Food, Dot Snap Fasteners, Goodrich Tires, White Horse Scotch, Pompeian Massage (for shaving), Jack Benny/Carole Lombard’s “To Be or Not To Be”, Colgate, Yardley powder and Mimeograph, and a few interspersed puff pieces—and a Ginger Rogers cover photo. But once LIFE paid its bills, the article got right to business, responding to a February article by sci-fi/novelist Philip Wylie on the possibilities of the U.S. losing the war…]

The article displayed six maps showing possible invasion routes from the east and west. It was also illustrated with four unusual graphic images depicting various parts of the U.S. attacked and pulverized by Japanese and German forces. [Images like these—outside the science fiction world--were very uncommon.]

The first image shows the assault and capture of the town of Dutch Harbor, “the pivot of Alaskan defense” by Japanese forces. I guess we’re to assume that the American military base on opposite the town has been overtaken already, with the assault on the town being a mop-up operation. Odd thing here is that Dutch Harbor and Fort Mears were actually attacked n 3 June 1942 by a Japanese aircraft carrier (and entourage) which inflicted moderate damage on the harbor and fort, and killed 78 Americans. This was a diversionary movement, meant to draw away American attention from Midway. It didn’t work.

This image shows Japanese mountain troops rounding up the locals after their successful attack on Mt. Rainier. I’m not so sure why the force was here and not in Seattle, as (a) there is no port here, and (b) there wasn’t anything going on so far as war production goers, which was definitely happening north of here. That’s a very long column of Japanese soldiers headed towards Rainier; I’m not sure where they were going. Also there are two large cannons (88s or thereabouts) taking aim at the mountain. Again, I think here that the mountain would win in the long run.

The petroleum culture is under attack here in southern California. The Japanese tank commander is shooting a gas station attendant who has just sprayed the tank with gas and set it on fire. I’m not sure why the oil facilities are on fire, unless we did it.

These Heinkel-177’s are bombing an unnamed East Coast war production plant, crossing the ocean straight from Germany ?). They are presented here essentially as a manned bomb—the crew was supposed to drop their load, destroy their secret equipment, then parachute and surrender after auguring in their aircraft. This push-pull engine configuration on this LIFE magazine version of a bad aircraft—and the only heavy bomber the Luftwaffe ever produced in numbers—never was able to drag this aircraft across the Atlantic. Its maximum bombing range was about 925 miles, which means even if the crew expected not to return it would still only get about two-thirds of the way across the ocean.

I’d say that this article might well have established a new fear-line in the minds of many of LIFE’s millions of readers, introducing them to the possibility of mainline attack just a few short months following Pearl Harbor.

On the History of Normalcy: Oskar Sclemmer & Dance, 1927

John F. Ptak — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:31:08 -0500

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Jean Bouillard (the famous physician), Joseph de Lalande (astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory), the Paris Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, Jacques Babinet, and the University of Bologna are examples of people and entities sharing something fantastically uncomfortable—they all ridiculed the initial presentations of what would become some of the most magnificent achievements of the last 500 years. Bouillard incredibly and improbably insisted that Edison’s phonograph was impossible and a hoax, Lalande thought it utterly impossible to fly, the Paris Academy found it absurd that steam could be applied to locomotion, the French Academy rejected Lavoisier’s findings that meteorites do indeed come from space, and the great Bologna spat on the idea of Galvani’s researches. So it goes. There are thousands and thousands of cases like these. Jenner, Semmelweis, Galileo, Harvey, Copernicus—all produced monumental achievements, and all faced incredible scorn and rebuke. Some had it even worse than this: Dante, Marco Polo, Walter Raleigh, Cervantes, Cellini, Voltaire, Pushkin, Turgenyev, Dostoyevsky, Baudilaire, Verlaine, Machiavelli, and etc.(and Galileo) not only found vast rejection, but were also imprisoned. (Some actually produced works in prison that would also be rejected: Raleigh wrote his history of the world in the White Tower, Pushkin, Eugene Onyegin; Marco Polo, his travels. Plato of course was also sold as a slave.) This list in general could go on and on--an encyclopedia of mistaken thought and stubbornness could easily be produced from centuries of thought like this, thinking that went outside the boundaries of “normalcy”.

The funny thing about “normalcy” is that all it seems to measure is the time it takes to move from one state of “normalcy” to the next. People should know better than to expect that there should be no periods of extended non-change.

It is interesting to think about how new ideas like these are perceived. I came to think about this searching for a picture of the wire costume for the black series in Oskar Schelmmer’s (1888-1943, designer, artist, dancer and by 1923 the Master of Form at the Bauhaus) Triadic Ballet ("Triadisches Ballett”)¹ of 1927. Better than a still, I actually found clips of the dance on youtube, which just floors me.

I imagine that Schlemmer didn’t find a very happy reception to his dance and costumes. He was outside the sphere of even those re-inventing dance in Germany in the early 1920’s. His concept of movement, among other things, differed from those of the other pioneers of this period, people like Mary Wigman, Francois Delsarte, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban—his inspiration came not from the center of the dancer’s experience, but from the costume itself, “which eliminates the torso” and “which the dancers measure out rather than feel out or explore”².

It is phenomenal to me to see these changes in dance in such a short time, and how much of this movement would have been nearly impossible to conceive as an art form only a decade or so earlier. Except to the minority of people like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, who had already rejected the restricting forms of classical ballet—the work of Schlemmer must’ve felt like a lightning strike.

1. See this on Musikperformance.

2..From Germany in the Twenties, the artist as Social Critic, a Collection of Essays, 1980, pg. 91.