Zeppelins, The Titanic, and the future of education: Studies in Crap celebrates progress with a 1913 Scientific American

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

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Scientific American

Date: August 23, 1913

Discovered at: Westport Antiques

Representative Quotes:

• “Probably the first whole-hearted aerial attack in modern warfare will be delivered from a very large and safe dirigible, a craft that can at least boast of a practical firing platform, notwithstanding the danger of conflagration.” (page 142).

• “Pedagogy in this alleged twentieth century is about in the same position as was astronomy in the age of Galileo.” (page 141).

For all its grand talk of battling airships, and its many photographs of resplendently whiskered men wired to apparatuses right out of a steampunk “Mouse Trap” game, this crumbling old Scientific American reveals at least two truths of American life that have only grown truer as the decades have passed: Our faith in new technology and our corresponding habit of only worrying about the safety of that new technology after the inevitable disasters.

Just as newspapers of late 2001 burst with advice for preventing future attacks identical in every particular to the one we had just endured, this 1913 broadsheet concerns itself with potential Titanics. (The original sank in April 1912.) The editors endorse two solutions. First, build larger, hulled lifeboats equipped with engines.

Second — HA! There is no second, because lifeboats = FAIL!

“A safe ship needs no lifeboat, and the long line of these craft, lining for hundreds of feet the upper deck of our great passenger steamers, is in itself a confession of failure. … Theoretically, thoroughly subdivided and carefully navigated ships need no multiplicity of lifeboats.”

By this logic, the vulcanized “skins” a bloke might slip into for consorting with a dollymop are a confession of his shameful inability to stiff upper-lip his way through a touch of the syph.

The editors express no safety concerns about the zeppelins and air-ships that parade through the “Aeronautics” round-up, even though the dangers of such are plain to anyone who has ever witnessed parade workers trying to wrangle a helium Garfield.