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John F. Ptak
From 1985-2003 I operated a bricks-and-mortar bookstore dedicated to the history of science. The stores were located primarily in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., with a short excursion to Old Town Alexandria, Va., and a warehouse in Silver Spring Maryland. The store's website has been in operation in one form or another since 1998, and it is now the principle venue for business. The blog associated with the online store is pretty mature at this point, with about 1.5 million words and thousands of posts, for good or ill.
Interests: art, math, history of science and technology; connections between/among physics, literature; the found-surreal; outsider art and logic; discrete ephemera.
Recent Activity
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post I think that this is the first time I've seen E=mc^2 incorrectly written in the same journal article. It occurs in a filler article in a 1950 slug filler piece in the New York... Continue reading
Posted Jul 4, 2024 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Here's an interesting combination of sweat and electricity--an enormous electrical device that was on display in an exhibit of "natural magic" at the Colosseum in Regent's Park in 1839. The large disk that the... Continue reading
Posted Jan 8, 2023 at JF Ptak Science Books
JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5154 For thousands of years the most popular fuel of the common idea for humans to achieve flight was through the application of bird flight mechanics. (The other common vehicle employed balloons of one... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2023 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Overall Post 5153 Answering the great North Call, to reach the North Pole, has been a quest for hundreds of explorers reaching back hundreds of years The image here depicts one iteration from 1890... Continue reading
Posted Jan 1, 2023 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Science Books Quick Post Overall Post #5152 Charles Goubet designed an interesting and technically advanced submersible boat, an electrically-powered submarine, which was the first of its kind to be powered in this way. The image below appeared in La... Continue reading
Posted Dec 31, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books (This is a slight expansion of an earlier post from 2011) "Simply the thing I am shall make me live."--from Jorge Luis Borges, "Shakespeare’s Memory" It would be a Purgatory, or worse, to suddenly wake up... Continue reading
Posted Dec 9, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (Overall Post 5152) It seems to me that these two photos may be of some interest to folks given how utterly jammed the scenes are with people and that their sources are pretty obscure.... Continue reading
Posted Nov 30, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books In my science bookstore business one of my principle interests is antique manuscript notebooks in the sciences. It is a pleasure to see someone working through a problem, or finding what the writer thought to be... Continue reading
Posted Nov 7, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (Overall post 5151) This beauty appears in the pages of Scientific American for 1896, and discusses a proposal for a bridge to connect Manhattan to Jersey, and to do so spectacularly. The plan was... Continue reading
Posted Aug 1, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5150 The subject of this woodcut is well out of my range, even on a better-than-beyond-my-means day, but the imagery is very sharp, and contrasting, and very unusual. I'd say that of the 5000+... Continue reading
Posted Jul 31, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Overall post 5149 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... Continue reading
Posted Apr 8, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post This does for a moment look like a piece of Found Scientific Art--and I guess it is--reminding me of a multiply-layered steely jaw of some creature, which you can see if you look hard... Continue reading
Posted Mar 30, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Amedee Couder wrote L'Architecture et l'industrie comme moyen de perfection sociale, a fine work that was published in Paris (by Brockhaus et Avenarius) in 1842.1 The work presents Couder's rather stroing visionary plans for a perfect... Continue reading
Posted Mar 10, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post I happened upon these lovely technical drawings --in plan and cross section--of the newly-patented Holophane Globe. The inventors and coiners of the Holophane were French scientist Andre Bondel and the Turkish Spiridion Psaroudak who... Continue reading
Posted Mar 4, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books The pamphlet Plight of Ukrainian DPs : a few typical letters of many being received daily from Europe describing the tragic plight of Ukrainian displaced persons whom the Soviets would forcibly repatriate and doom to enslavement,... Continue reading
Posted Feb 27, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Old Post 1470 expanded and updated. Eleven years ago on this blog (May 2011) I wrote about the fantastical idea of Dr. T. Kennard Thomson for expanding NYC land and wharf area by reclaiming parts of... Continue reading
Posted Feb 9, 2022 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5148 This is a photograph of the surrender of the German high seas fleet at the Firth of Forth (Scotland), 21 November 1918. The image was undoubtedly made from an airship, and centers on... Continue reading
Posted Dec 16, 2021 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5147 This news photo service image--stamped "Hearst-Pathe News Agency" on the back--is from the winter of 1917/1918 and shows a patriotic snow parade somewhere in the United States. The snow looks prodigious, judging from... Continue reading
Posted Dec 16, 2021 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Overall Post 5146 So, the Dearborn Independent was owned and published by Ford beginning in 1920 and rose to a circulation of 900,000 issues a day, the second-leading circulation in the country. It was... Continue reading
Posted Dec 10, 2021 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5145 John Nystrom's “A New System of Arithmetic and Metrology, called the Tonal System”1 (1863) is a very early entry in the history of the application of the hexadecimal system. Nystrom's plan included converting... Continue reading
Posted Dec 10, 2021 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Overall Post 5144 Q: "What kinds of programs will there be on television? A: "All kinds" ("The commercials will be unlike radio.") I was initially attracted to this oversized pamphlet for its A-Bomb cover--using... Continue reading
Posted Dec 10, 2021 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5143 This is a short note on an interesting series of reports in the venerable journal Nature (1911) regarding the status of women in the sciences. These are three short articles (about 1750 words... Continue reading
Posted Dec 9, 2021 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5142 Earlier today I catalogued a small tri-folding World War I-related leaflet printed in 1936 and emblazoned Krieg!!! The cover is striking, partly because in addition to the graphics it also shows something being... Continue reading
Posted Nov 6, 2021 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5141 Here's a short notice on an unusual perspective in the combined categories of cutaway diagrams and looking-straight-down: the (almost)-looking-straight-down bird's-eye cutaway view! I rarely see these two categories combined...and as a matter of... Continue reading
Posted Oct 9, 2021 at JF Ptak Science Books
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JF Ptak Science Books Overall Post 5140 This short announcement1--a carbon copy of a press release from the US Army Forces Western Pacific, Public Relations Office--while only reaching 150 words or so, establishes a very compelling and passionate statement on... Continue reading
Posted Aug 29, 2021 at JF Ptak Science Books