Bureaucratic Los Alamos and more
Cumulo-stratus from Cloudland
This post highlights just a few of the remarkable and rare books we have been lucky enough to acquire last year at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives (NBLA). Please enjoy, and email us at nbl@aip.org with any questions about the books or to make an appointment to see them for yourself.
The Zia Company in Los Alamos: A History by McKee, Robert E. (1950)
This book is a firsthand account of the civilian company that contracted with the United States federal government to manage the physical site of Los Alamos after World War II. Written by Robert E. McKee, the general contractor of the eponymous McKee construction firm that built Los Alamos, the Zia Company was founded in 1946 to operate the town of Los Alamos, and all that entailed. McKee writes about the organization of the Zia Company itself as well as all of its responsibilities. While written rather bureaucratically, it shows the administrative side of a great scientific endeavor.
A Compendious System of Astronomy by Margaret Bryan (1797)
Engraving of Margaret Bryan (left) and her two daughters Ann Marian (center) and Sarah Maria (right)
The full title of this book is: A Compendious System of Astronomy, in a Course of Familiar Lectures…Also Trigonometrical and Celestial Problems, with a Key to the Ephemeris, and a Vocabulary of the Terms of Science Used in the Lectures. Margaret Bryan was an English educator and natural philosopher who taught science to women and girls in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In addition to the two books on display, she also wrote An Astronomical and Geographical Class Book for the Use of Schools and Private Families, 1815. Bryan opened her first boarding school for girls in 1791 where she instructed the girls in natural philosophy. Her teaching experience informed her first book, which was so popular it went through three printings. She dedicated the book to her pupils. She had to close her school in 1798 but by 1800 she’d opened a new school nearby where she continued to teach natural philosophy. Her second book was published in 1806 and contained lectures on hydrostatics, optics, and acoustics. Each book included a small portrait of Margaret Bryan, so we can see her as well as read her words. Bryan died in 1836 although it wasn’t until the 2020s that researchers uncovered more about her life story.
A compendious system of astronomy Catalog Link
Television for the Home by Ronald Tiltman (1927)
The Transmitting “Televisor”: Mr. Baird, seated with two dolls before his transmitting apparatus and surrounded by a battery of electric lights, is being “televised.”
In 1927, decades before televisions became everyday household furniture, Ronald F. Tiltman published the book Television for the Home. This fascinating piece of technology history explains the science of television for laypeople, discusses the history and people involved in its invention (up to 1927, of course), and makes interesting observations and predictions about the use of this new technology. The introduction is written by Archibald Low, who himself was an early innovator of television technology and gave a famous demonstration of his television system, which he called “Televista,” at the Institute of Automobile Engineers in London. He writes in the introduction to Television for the Home:
Wireless telephony is becoming an accepted fact of daily life; it is bringing the corners of the earth together and opening the world before our eyes. But this cold speech, however wonderful, is insufficient. Does not everybody know the time when the telephone is put down in disgust as we realize that something more complete is necessary? It is for this reason that the sense of sight is becoming so important. That we should be able to see our business friends, that we should be able to shorten distance and control our partings, is becoming natural… It is by television, by the production of practically instantaneous images of people and of objects from one quarter of the world to another, that mankind is overcoming his physical infirmities and restrictions.
This vision is in contrast to modern associations with television, which perhaps center mostly around entertainment. Indeed, this sounds an awful lot like video conferencing for work or school. In light of the 2020 pandemic, we might even take Low’s words - “overcoming physical infirmities” - in a literal sense, with a Zoom call.
Book cover, prize page, and current Waid Academy seal
NBLA’s copy of the book has special features because it was a prize for a student (the name is hard to read - maybe Jas. Viol Fortune?) at Waid Academy in Anstruther, Scotland, in 1930. In addition to the prize presentation label glued into the front endpaper, the school seal is stamped in gilt and black on the front cover of the book.
Television for the Home Catalog Link
Cloudland: A Study on the Structure and Characters of Clouds by William Clement Ley (1894, first edition)
Cumulo-nimbus from Cloudland
William Clement Ley (1840-1896) was an ordained priest, a meteorologist, and, one might argue, an artist, who spent much of his adult life in Leicestershire, England. Despite dedicating his career to the church, he had a keen interest in meteorology - especially clouds - and was elected as a Fellow of the Meteorological Society and published scholarly research. Cloudland (available digitally via Internet Archive ) is his longest and most significant work, and he painted the lovely watercolor clouds throughout it himself. Building on the work of another amateur English meteorologist, Luke Howard, Clement added cloud-form symbols to the three already determined by Howard.1 Cloudland was a step towards refining our understanding of cloud classification.
Oliver Sacks bookplate
The NBLA copy is a first edition, and features a bookplate from the library of Dr. Oliver Sacks with an octopus design. Dr. Oliver Sacks was a renowned British neurologist, naturalist, and historian of science.He had the bookplate specially designed; check out Jane Cumming’s article on it from Fine Books & Collections.
Planetoida 2100 by Józefa Maria Burdecka (1934)
Front cover of Planetoida 2100
This science fiction short story, published in 1934, is a bit of an unusual acquisition for us. When we bought the book, we knew very little about the author. From the bookseller Type Punch Matrix, we knew that the book is a Polish science fiction story by a little-known woman author of the 1930s, aimed at young readers, set on a rocket to Mars in the far-off year of 1955. It was published as no. 64 in the series Zajmujące Czytanki (“Interesting Reading”). The cover features a striking three-color Art Deco illustration by artist Hanna Przezdziecka Kędzierska (1911-2004), who was well known for her magazine cover work.
While NBLA does have some science fiction, we limit the scope because the world of science fiction is so vast that we would soon run out of space. However, the fact that it was written by a woman author and aimed at young people - maybe even young girls - in eastern Europe in the 1930s makes for quite an interesting piece. It’s also very rare; only two other copies exist in WorldCat , and they are both in Poland.
Thanks to a Facebook comment by Jakub Müller, who has written a wonderful piece on a photo of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein for the blog, we did get a bit more information about the author: “Józefa Maria Burdecka (née Klinke) was Feliks Burdecki’s wife. She was born in 1904 and they got married in 1924. Indeed, very little is known about her literary career. Feliks Burdecki himself was a prolific writer, publisher and editor - one of the science fiction pioneers in Poland. He wrote several books, describing future machines, space flights etc.”
We hope to do more research and find out more about the author and the contents of the story.
Inside the Atom by Marie Nuertah (1956)
Inner page of Inside the Atom
Marie Neurath (1898-1986) was a German designer and social scientist. She worked on the International System of Typographic Picture Education (Isotype), also called the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics. She fled from the Nazis in 1940 and founded the Isotype Institute in Oxford, England, with her husband Otto. Marie and her cohort are now recognized as data visualization pioneers. Each title in this “Visual Science” series for children included a teacher and a student version of the text.
For more about Marie Neurath’s design check out this online exhibit: https://www.marieneurath.org/
Reference
- Houze, R. A., and R. Houze, 2019: Cloud and Weather Symbols in the Historic Language of Weather Map Plotters. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 100, ES423–ES443, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0071.1 .
