Need to brush up on your heraldry before donning your armor and traipsing off to the Rennaissance Fair? Try checking out Project Gutenberg’s illustrated version of The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition, by Anonymous.
Okay, okay, it’s not really a gem, except in the sense that it’s interesting to read an early example of utter and complete mumbo jumbo. Occult Chemistry, by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater is an extensive, detailed, and complete description of chemistry as revealed to the authors through clairvoyance. Published in 1919, the exact nature of elements was still fairly new: Rutherford had proposed his planetary model of the atom in 1911. Still, this had to have been considered craziness of the highest order, even in 1919.
A quote, just to give the flavor:
I remember the occasion vividly. Mr. Leadbeater was then staying at my house, and his clairvoyant faculties were frequently exercised for the benefit of myself, my wife and the theosophical friends around us. I had discovered that these faculties, exercised in the appropriate direction, were ultra-microscopic in their power. It occurred to me once to ask Mr. Leadbeater if he thought he could actually see a molecule of physical matter. He was quite willing to try, and I suggested a molecule of gold as one which he might try to observe. He made the appropriate effort, and emerged from it saying the molecule in question was far too elaborate a structure to be described. It evidently consisted of an enormous number of some smaller atoms, quite too many to count; quite too complicated in their arrangement to be comprehended. It struck me at once that this might be due to the fact that gold was a heavy metal of high atomic weight, and that observation might be more successful if directed to a body of low atomic weight, so I suggested an atom of hydrogen as possibly more manageable. Mr. Leadbeater accepted the suggestion and tried again. This time he found the atom of hydrogen to be far simpler than the other, so that the minor atoms constituting the hydrogen atom were countable. They were arranged on a definite plan, which will be rendered intelligible by diagrams later on, and were eighteen in number.
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is a detailed account of one of my favorite things in life:
The Food of the Gods, by Brandon Head
When one thinks of the marvellously nourishing and stimulating virtue of cocoa, and of the exquisite and irresistible dainties prepared from it, one cannot wonder that the great Linnæus should have named it theo broma, “the food of the gods.” No other natural product, with the exception of milk, can be said to serve equally well as food or drink, or to possess nourishing and stimulating properties in such well-adjusted proportions.
Amen!
A hacker’s project of old, perhaps as would have populated Make magazine had it existed in July of 1887:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Scientific American Supplement, July 9, 1887
HOW TO MAKE A STAR FINDER.
Being all of wood, it is easily made by any one who can use a few tools, the only bit of lathe work necessary being the turned shoulder, K, of polar axis. A is the baseboard, 9 in. by 5 in., near each corner of which is inserted an ordinary wood screw, S S, for the purpose of leveling the base, to which two side pieces are nailed, having the angle, x, equal to the co-latitude of the place. On to these side pieces is fastened another board, on which is marked the hour circle, F. Through this board passes the lower end of the polar axis, having a shoulder turned up on it at K, and is secured by a wooden collar and pin underneath. On to the upper part of the polar axis is fastened the declination circle, C, 5½ in. diameter, made of ¼ in. baywood, having the outer rim of a thin compass card divided into degrees pasted on to it. The hour circle, F, is half of a similar card, with the hours painted underneath, and divided to 20 minutes. G is the hour index. D is a straight wooden pointer, 12 in. long, having a piece of brass tube, E, attached, and a small opening at J, into which is fixed the point of a common pin by which to set the pointer in declination. H is a nut to clamp pointer in position. By this simple toy affair I have often picked up the planet Venus at midday when visible to the naked eye.–T.R. Clapham in English Mechanic.
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is just something that interested me vaguely: Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders. To be honest, I haven’t spent much time reading it, after all, you’d expect that we would know significantly more about this than those people publishing in 1912, but it does have some nice pictures and diagrams of rock burial mounds from the world over, including, of course Stonehenge.
Robert Hooke’s Micrographia is one of the earliest books about the use of a microscope to view the world of the minescule. Published in 1664, it’s really quite astounding, and includes some very nice drawings, such as the flea pictured on the right.
Check it out.
I’m interested in a wide variety of rustic crafts, so I found A Course In Wood Turning, by Archie S. Milton. to be a cool addition to the growing list of public domain works you can fetch from Project Gutenberg. It’s neat, and includes many diagrams and photos.
I’m fascinated by old cookbooks and the like, which is why I found The Cyder-Maker’s Instructor, Sweet-Maker’s Assistant, and Victualler’s and Housekeeper’s Director to be interesting. I mean really, who thinks about making cider anymore?
Old knowledge, preserved.
Need to know what to do in the event of a nuclear attack? Well, given that it would most likely be a low yield dirty bomb, you probably won’t find any useful information In Time of Emergency, but heck, your tax dollars paid for it, you might as well have a peek. It also includes some basic first aid information as well as information about floods, tornadoes and other natural disasters, so it might actually be of some use.
Of course you can get the original Archer Productions movie Duck and Cover from archive.org.
Today’s book which crossed the Distributed Proofreader’s RSS feed and caught my eye is Beeton’s Book of Needlework by Isabella Beeton. It includes all sorts of cool illustrations of tatting, embroidery, and crochet.
I’m about to admit to something which will undoubtably blow some serious cool-geek points: I’ve actually done embroidery before, and my grandmother Francis taught me to crochet when I was probably six or seven, and I’m still pretty good at it. She did remarkable work, and made many lovely, intricate doilies and mattes in ornate pineapple patterns. Every Christmas I think I should make a bunch of crocheted snowflakes like the ones she had on her tree, most of which have long since frayed and decomposed. Someday, I’ll get to it. Crocheted snowflakes always remind me of her, as does certain Polish foods, good kosher pickles, and macaroni and cheese with sliced hot dogs. Francis, you are not forgotten.
Yes, I can crochet and embroider. And knit (not as well as crocheting, but still passable well). But I don’t tat. Tatting is for quiche eating wimps.
Here is a nice link with some pineapple crochet patterns to get you all started.
A nice resource for those of us who are interested in the public domain: U.S. Copyright Renewals 1950 - 1977 by U.S. Copyright Office courtesy of Project Gutenberg. A nice 31 megabyte file of things which are likely to not be in the public domain. Useful!
It’s great to see a book related to one of my pet interests made available on Project Gutenberg. Today’s Gem is the classic treatise on light, called (curiously enough) Treatise on Light, by Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch mathematician and physicist who first argued that light propagated as a wave. He has an extensive resumé: according to Wikipedia, he also discovered Saturn’s moon Titan, wrote the first book on probability theory, discovered he the laws governing the motion of pendulums, and patented a pocket watch. He also wrote the book Cosmotheoros, one of the first books to speculate on the possibility of life on other planets.
Good stuff.
Today’s Gem is Things to Make, by Archibald Williams. Yes, it’s dated, but c’mon! Where else are you going to find plans for a silhouettograph? Get the PDF, the illustrations are nice, and the plain text version won’t do it justice.
To tease, here is the table of contents:
I. SAWING TRESTLE
II. A JOINER’S BENCH
III. A HANDY BOOKSTAND
IV. A HOUSE LADDER
V. A DEVELOPING SINK
VI. A POULTRY HOUSE AND RUN
VII. A SHED FOR YOUR BICYCLE
VIII. A TARGET APPARATUS FOR RIFLE SHOOTING
IX. CABINET-MAKING
X. TELEGRAPHIC APPARATUS
XI. A RECIPROCATING ELECTRIC MOTOR
XII. AN ELECTRIC ALARM CLOCK
XIII. A MODEL ELECTRIC RAILWAY
XIV. A SIMPLE RECIPROCATING ENGINE
XV. A HORIZONTAL SLIDE-VALVE ENGINE
XVI. MODEL STEAM TURBINES
XVII. STEAM TOPS
XVIII. MODEL BOILERS
XIX. QUICK-BOILING KETTLES
XX. A HOT-AIR ENGINE
XXI. A WATER MOTOR
XXII. MODEL PUMPS
XXIII. KITES
XXIV. PAPER GLIDERS
XXV. A SELF-LAUNCHING MODEL AEROPLANE
XXVI. APPARATUS FOR SIMPLE SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS
XXVII. A RAIN GAUGE
XXVIII. WIND VANES WITH DIALS
XXIX. A STRENGTH-TESTING MACHINE
XXX. LUNG-TESTING APPARATUS
XXXI. HOME-MADE HARMONOGRAPHS
XXXII. A SELF-SUPPLYING MATCHBOX
XXXIII. A WOODEN WORKBOX
XXXIV. WRESTLING PUPPETS
XXXV. DOUBLE BELLOWS
XXXVI. A HOME-MADE PANTOGRAPH
XXXVII. A SILHOUETTE DRAWING MACHINE
XXXVIII. A SIGNALLING LAMP
XXXIX. A MINIATURE GASWORKS
Michael Faraday instituted a tradition (which continues to this day) of giving special Christmas lectures especially for young people at the Royal Institution. The most famous of these lectures were published in 1860 as The Chemical History of the Candle, which is a classic in the history of science, and still accessible and useful to students. Check it out. I hope they have an illustrated version coming soon.
Project Gutenberg has released transcripts of every President’s State of the Union addresses, starting with a more important George W.
