#edward moore

[californiastrs]

Rosemary Kennedy dancing with Edward Moore, a close family friend

[kennedycore]

The Kennedy children photographed in Cohasset, Massachusetts, c. 1923-1924.

Top left: Joe Jr, Kathleen (Kick), and Rosemary with their grandfather Patrick Joseph Kennedy.

Top right: Jack and Rosemary with their grandfather.

Bottom: Jack and Kick with close family friend, Edward Moore.

[drownmeinbeauty]

ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE

Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. at The Met showcases objects the nineteenth-century designer acquired on travels to the east alongside pieces he designed for the company. Walking through one wonders, what is the difference between inspiration and appropriation? And one concludes, right away, the quality of the work.

The objects themselves, of both kind, are stunning. There's a silver vase by Tiffany, depicting a dragonfly caught in a spider's web, that's a flat-out copy of the Japanese ink brush stand set right beside it. But, as is typical, the works whose design Moore supervised speak for themselves. They have their own magnificence and hold their own, matching the originals in fineness, complexity and charisma.

Moore was an orientalist, a Victorian-American who took inspiration from India, China, Japan, Persia and the Arab without troubling himself t understand the cultures deeply. This was part of his milieu. In photographs, his boss Charles Louis Tiffany's New York house and studio is chock full of hanging glass lamps, palm trees, mud brick arches, monumental urns, and carved wood screens. It's a bourgeois mansion dressed in foreign fantasia. Every surface of the interior is embellished with metal, masonry and wood frou frou, much of it referencing exotic -- that is, non-European -- sources.

In later years Moore's work crossed the line from craft to obsession, luxury to opulence, joyfully eccentric to oppressively bizarre. There is a swan-shaped centerpiece as imposing and muscular as a real-life animal, a coffee pot so enthusiastically decorated with Indian, Arab and Persian motifs that no flat surface remains, and, in the final gallery, a pair of candelabra as massive and menacing as bouncers outside a club. One thing that Moore didn't accept from his foreign sources, especially the Japanese objects on display here, was restraint in scale. This exhibit shows well how foreign works can energize artists, and also how native forces -- in this case capitalism -- remain inescapable. Moore's designs borrowed technically and formally for eastern sources, in ultimate service of bourgeois display.

Teapot, Tiffany and Company, 1872–1873, Silver, 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 3 3/8 in. Photography courtesy The Met.

[yan-wo]

Edward Moore, Tiffany Flora

[swanlake1998]

llanchie stevenson and edward moore with arthur mitchell photographed by star telegram photo

[historicalfirearms]

Moore’s Centrifugal Machine Gun

In June 1918, Major Edward T. Moore and Saul Singer filed a patent for an intriguing new kind of weapon based upon a principle that man had mastered centuries earlier. 

Moore and Singer’s machine gun operated using the principle of centrifugal force - an inertial force which appears to act on objects moving in a circular path, and is directed away from the axis of rotation. As such the machine gun required no propellant powder to propel the projectile, or a case to contain it, nor a conventional rifled barrel to stabilise the projectile. 

Moore, an alumni of the Princeton class of 1903, an attorney who practised in New York and a Major in the New Jersey National Guard, claimed that the idea for his weapon came from the “story of David slaying Goliath with a stone which he whirled around his head in a sling” according to a piece in Volume 21, No.5 of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. The short article goes on to explain that Moore offered his invention to the War Department shortly before the end of World War One. The cessation of hostilities apparently stalled development but the by late 1920, the gun had been tested.   

The weapon itself was powered by a powerful electric motor which spooled up the centrifugal barrel assembly to rotate extremely quickly and impart centrifugal force on projectiles. According to Julian Hatcher the gun could fire steel ball bearing projectiles at approximately 1,200 feet per second. Fire was controlled not by the weapon’s motor but by a stop pin in the ammunition feed tube. Moore claimed the weapon could fire a projectile 1.5 miles with enough force to kill a man. He also suggested the weapon's rate of fire approached 2,000 rounds per minute. The patent describes the machine gun as “simple and inexpensive and well suited to quantity manufacture.”

Moore and Singer also designed a feed system for their machine gun, with the projectiles fed through a hopper. This system was patented in August 1918, with the inventors claiming:

“Our invention will be found particularly useful in connection with centrifugal machine guns where it is necessary to feed large numbers of bullets in rapid succession to the gun... our improved mechanism no jamming is possible and the bullets are positively fed in rapid succession as long as the mechanism is operated and there are bullets remaining in the hopper”

The system was decidedly more simple than the machine gun itself comprising a hand cranked carousel which regulated the flow of projectiles into the feed tube. This tube can be seen, along with the weapon’s battery powered motor, in image #4.

Moore and Singer’s feed system for their centrifugal machine gun (source)

The patents for the weapon and the feed system were assigned to the Aero Tank Machine Gun Co. Inc., registered in October 1918 in New York. This parent company appear to have continued developing the idea of a centrifugal machine gun into the 1920s. At least one more patent was filled with the company as the assignee, not in Moore or Singer’s name but ascribed to Victor Czegka. 

Czegka’s centrifugal machine gun patent (source)

Czegka, a US Marine Corps Technical Sergeant, is perhaps best known as the supply officer of Admiral Richard Byrd’s first two expeditions to the Antarctic. Czegka’s centrifugal machine gun patent claimed to improve the aiming and stability of the projectile as well as attempting to ensure “the safety of the operator.” As such the barrel rotated within a shield with the barrel being aimed with a pinion system. Unlike Moore’s gun which could only be controlled by closing off the ammunition feed tube Czegka’s gun has a more controlled feed with a timing block feeding projectiles into the spinning breech block. It is unclear if Czegka’s gun was officially tested. 

The concept of a centrifugal gun has long interested firearms designers and inventors. It is problems with control, accuracy and feeding, however, which have made the concept difficult to realise. Julian Hatcher, a Major with the US Army Ordnance Department during the war, described the accuracy of Moore’s centrifugal machine gun as ‘extremely poor’ and the weapon’s testing did not proceed. 

Sources:

Images 1-3

Hatcher’s Notebook, J.S. Hatcher (1962) [image #4]

‘Centrifugal Machine Gun’, E.T. Moore & S. Singer, US Patent #1332933, Mar. 1920 (source)

‘Feeding Bullets and The Like from Hoppers’, E.T. Moore & S. Singer, US Patent #1332993, Mar. 1920 (source)

‘Centrifugal Gun’, V.H. Czegka, US Patent #1404378, Jun. 1922 (source)

Princeton Alumni Weekly, Vol. 21, No.5, 3 Nov. 1920 (source) 

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[kennedycamelot]

January 1, 1938: Rosemary and Eunice Kennedy with Edward Moore arriving in Plymouth, U.K. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

[swanlake1998]

virginia johnson, lydia abarca, william scott, gerald banks, susan lovelle, and edward moore photographed performing in arthur mitchell’s rhythmetron by john lindquist // jacob’s pillow dance festival archives